Beware of proxies
A project is started. Goals are set. Timelines are established. And then you start tracking to those timelines, and you report out using your friendly Project Manager, and as releases happen, the product managers are collecting feedback and the customer support channel is telling you how customers are liking it.
And there you are, the engineer. With no line of sight to what is actually going on with the customer.
You remember the game of telephone? You whisper something to the person sitting next to you, who whispers what they have heard to the next person.. and when the circle completes what person 1 had said was completely different from what the last person heard. And we all crack up, laughing hysterically. That is what proxying does at the workplace as well.
Use proxies wisely. The key place you do not want a proxy: connecting with your customer. As a leader, as an engineer, develop customer empathy by listening and watching customers do their work, without having a proxy translate for you. Intuit famously has the somewhat creepily named ‘follow-me-home’ sessions, where employees — including engineers — watch the customers do their work, without proxies. (Listening to customers is another proxy — Scott Cook emphasizes that you want to see them do their work, rather than them telling you what they do).
Engineers build what customers will use. Knowing what the customers want will help build the right thing.
In larger organizations, a more insidious kind of proxying takes place. The process becomes the thing to solve for — it is the outcome. Teams resort to checking boxes as dictated by the Project Managers as opposed to thinking about the customer outcomes they need to be solving for. So everyone says ‘hurray, we did it!’ and celebrate. Everyone except the customer, that is. What has been built solved for the process — and the organization has lost its focus on the customer outcome.
Another telling sight of solving for proxies is when releases are celebrated. There is a party, and champagne flows. This party is premature. What should be celebrated is the customer’s reaction to the release. If it is crickets you hear, you have built the wrong thing. Never take your eye off the ball. Solve for the customer, and challenge those who do not.
