Most organisations say they are customer-focused. And while that may be the case at the executive level – complete with careful analysis of customer behaviour and expectations to maintain a competitive advantage – sadly, the critical knowledge of consumer patterns and shifting desires does not always extend to the internal teams that need to understand them most. In this case, the engineering teams.
In many places I have worked, there has been a covert premise – that in the dingy confines of delivery and engineering, they should not care much for the customer’s experience. It’s somebody else’s role to ensure their satisfaction, and even talking to a customer should be offloaded to some specialist house offering quantitative this and qualitative that; we just build what we are told to.
Reject that premise!
I get loads of unsolicited LinkedIn requests offering offshore/nearshore software development. Promises of access to vast talent pools, lowering my costs, reducing my turnover rate, or offloading my payroll.
And that is very true and extremely tempting to some technology firms. A nice flexible bench model with engineers I will never create a relationship with allows me to scale up and down with faceless communication and very little liability.
We don’t believe in that at Tyk. Our principle is that an empowered and mission-connected team, wherever in the organisation they work, drives a fantastic customer experience.
Compartmentalising the process is not the way forward. When engineering teams have a clear understanding of the customer’s needs, not only do they create better solutions, but they are more engaged and productive along the way.
Here’s why.
The product direction is yours…ish
It significantly affects how the product turns out when your team actively seeks and encourages ideas and input into product direction every day. Engineers come loaded with ideas; they are given space to build POCs (and some fail, and we throw them away – so what?), and they are given a regular platform to influence where their domain is going.
But this isn’t just an engineering thing; here at Tyk, we have input from commercial teams, customer engineering, support, and solution architecture. Opinions are expected here – and the SPM has the job of arbitrating all this fertility into a coherent direction.
The onus must be to connect everyone to the product mission – but back to engineers for a second – ours are curious and opinionated and have been responsible for some of the best ideas we’ve taken to market – and this is because we reject the premise that an engineer is an automaton turning tasks.
When we build and ship something, we always circle back and inform the team who made it how it’s being received – good and more temperate feedback – because this builds a tangibility with the thing they confected and built.
You talk to people outside your organisation
This is sucking egg territory, right?
Maybe, but if you involve engineers and scrum teams in calls with prospects, existing customers, and industry analysts and attend conferences, sparks will fly.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to syphon all this through a product manager, but for us, that does not build empathy between a customer and an engineer, it does not drive verbatim insight, and to be brutally honest, it does not build accountability when we have messed up.
This dialogue is essential – understanding what is used and how it could be better – builds the contract between delivery teams and actual customer impact.
You foster more effective teams
If you take the craft of software engineering seriously and challenge your engineers to improve how they engineer, the results will follow.
Trust and empowerment are essential. Working in this way allows us to commit to ensuring that any product area can build and release high-quality, secure, performant and reliable features efficiently and with high speed to the delight of our customers.
We give sprint space for each product domain to allocate time to improve how we deliver software and develop our engineers as much as possible. Last year, the entire engineering team attended courses run by Codecrafters, focusing on engineering best practices.
We’ve also educated engineers on Kubernetes, SQL, and Scrum for engineers. If you’re serious about self-organising, effective teams, you must equip everyone to succeed and drive autonomy.
A customer-driven approach
While most organisations say they put the customer first, the proof is in their structural decisions and internal investments to instil a customer focus across every team, including engineering.
Organisations that invest in engineering teams and allow time to ensure they clearly understand customer needs will end up with better products, happier teams and more satisfied customers.
Tyk strives to provide acceleration, best practices, and governance in delivering our product. We treat Platform Engineering as a product domain, where the customers are our internal teams. You can get in touch with our expert team to learn more about how we work.
