Keep product development close to customers

I’ve noticed a trend at kCura. As the company has grown, the departments have drifted into their own separate and siloed operations. Product managers advocate for further separation of the Engineering teams from the customers, claiming that they need heads-down time to finish product features (which they do. Despite following an iterative approach, we have years of work on our plates). Customer Support managers advocate for a customer separation from the engineers because they don’t know how to talk to customers. Both sides agree the most efficient way to manage customers is to segregate their interactions to the support personnel and keep them from the engineers.

My team operates like a minified version of kCura by offering customized solutions to our clients. I began as an engineer and have now assumed a role closer to customer support. In the process, I’ve found that I and my fellow engineers would rather not be bothered by customers. On the other hand, I’ve participated in several projects that were phenomenal ideas no one ever used, and I’m sick of the wasted effort.

Importance

A business that loses touch with its customer’s needs can’t iterate on the right features. It will spend months generating features no one wants and leave the customers thinking that the product must not be for them anymore. When another business comes along who does listen and respond to customers, they’ll capture many of the customers from the previous company.

Pfafflin recognized her company wasn’t considering customer’s usage when she found herself answering the same questions over and over ((Alvarez, pg. 185)). Although she had valuable information for the engineering teams, there was no mechanism to share it. This same division exists at kCura, but for the last five years, my team has filled the gap by developing custom workarounds to the pain points in our software. Because we heard directly from clients we could build what they actually needed. Our team is transitioning from this stop-gap task, which means kCura will either learn to hear from customers or will drift further from solving their problems.

Application

There’s a shocking level of distrust between the customer-facing and engineering teams that only regular interaction alleviates. For a while, our customer-facing teammates didn’t sit on the same floor as the developers, and within a month we were suspicious of the customer requests they’d send us.

As we transition into a developer support role, I have a unique opportunity to help re-shape our team so that everyone gets some level of client interaction. Taking Alvarez' recommendation to have a centralized, easy-to-access place to aggregate customer data ((Alvarez, pg. 191)), I think we could begin early on to think about our customer’s needs, to capture them in a reviewable form, and to develop our solutions according to this valuable data.

References