Comment by codyb
4 hours ago
This is why I built out a Shadow Sessions program for our internal tooling teams at my BigCo.
The users are right there, go make friends. Learn what they're doing day to day. And how it fits into the larger picture.
These sessions are lightweight, and auto schedule every three weeks with no required action items and people come out of it amazed every time, lots of little bugs have been fixed, and connections are being made.
The culture of not engaging with the end users when they're so readily available is an odd one to me. And you can really get to say 80% of macro picture understanding and user experience design fundamentals with a fairly low lift.
To do this I created a sign up form and an auto scheduler that interacts with the Slack API. The scheduling and getting folk on board is the hardest part. Also finding time if you do things outside the product road map.
A bit more heavyweight, but we implemented a rotation program when I was managing an internal tools team at a previous company. We'd trade an engineer from our team with an engineer from a feature team for a quarter.
The amount of improvements to our collective understandings was super valuable. Feature devs got to help fix problems with their tools more directly (while also learning that it's not always as straightforward as it may seem), and we brought back much stronger insights into the experience of actually using our tools day-to-day.