Customer-driven engineering

We’re in the process of renovating our house with my wife.

We have a bunch of “engineers” working on it: electricians, plumbers, wall painters. These guys have direct contact with the customers. What they are working on will be immediately visible to the customer. They must be thinking about the customer all the time, and satisfy their needs. There is no management, customer support, release dates in between (I’m sure there is for larger objects). What they are doing is visible at the spot and they must make sure it looks right, otherwise the customer will be mad.

This sounds very similar to what freelancing software engineers are doing. On the other hand, software engineers that work at big companies have huge layers before they reach the customers. As a consequence, most of them even rarely think about their customers at all.

Lately I’ve been thinking about our customers more and more. What we are building as software engineers are decisions that were discussed with other smart people at meetings, etc. But I think there is still value in constantly asking yourself: “what will the customer think about this?”, “what will their reaction be on what I’m building right now”, etc.

Do you ever think about your customers, or only your code like most of us? 🙂