[phuff]

"This is the kind of magic that sometimes happens when an engineer gets to talk directly to the users to find out what they are doing"

I think this is also the kind of magic that happens when a business is operating well and it's employees have empathy for each other.

If Engineering and Product are well aligned it should be a matter of habit to be looking for and executing on regular projects like Olaf's new menu item or the auto fill of a new account form mentioned here.

As engineers and engineering management we can make sure there is room in our schedules for these kinds of small projects.

And if we develop well our relationships with our product managers we can make those conversations like the one about the form auto filler easier to happen: "this is three hours of work tomorrow that will save this team 10s of hours each week until we get the new system built, it's worth an afternoon one sprint for a developer".

But also what I think is best displayed in this report is empathy :). Organizations that show empathy for their users are ones that tend to be the best to work for because they actually care about people who are using their products and the people who are making their products. And in general, over time, I think empathy builds better customer and employment relationships which then builds better businesses.