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by klodolph
640 days ago
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> There's a lot of value in the entire product team understanding the customer/user. This has to be the most common fallacious line of thought that I see in discussions about roles and experiences at work. Whether something has a lot of value is, well, irrelevant. There are just too many different things that provide a lot of value to the team. The problem is that things that provide value come with a cost and sometimes with harsh tradeoffs. If you decide that everybody on your engineering team must interact with customers, then maybe you get the value—but you also drive away some valuable team members who don’t like customer-facing roles. Your team becomes more homogeneous and you lose some diversity of thought. Most teams need a combination of viewpoints to succeed—we don’t just need to develop our customer focus, but also our focus on tech, on operations, on finance, on personnel, etc. Another way I see this fallacious reasoning pop up is when people say that managers should be engineers or have an engineering background… because managers are better managers if they have an engineering background. All other factors being equal, this is true! But a lot of similar things are true, like how engineers would be better engineers if the had management backgrounds. We must accept some level of specialization because specialization is good for the team. Specialization doesn’t just mean that people have additional skills, it also means that people are missing skills. |
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I was kinda acknowledging a relatively uncontroversial point on which the article was predicated, before moving on responding to the parent comment with my interpretation of the more novel contribution of the article.
Agreed about a lot of things having value, diversity of viewpoints and skillsets also having value and being a reality, that not everyone wants to be customer-facing, and the importance of not emphasizing one bit of folk wisdom to the exclusion of other wisdom.