As a senior individual contributor at organisation level, product development and engineering levels, I recently started to question the activities I’m producing with “who is my audience for this engineering piece?”. Of course these are always written on some docs, JIRA stories etc. but feeling of usefulness, feeling of creating value for the Customer starts to diminish when you are out of reach and all you have is the virtual definition of the Customer and their needs.
This article and the link in it gave a good perspective why I started to question this. At some organisational scale for a startup, these are inevitable. However, when you are a passionate contributor and still love what you are doing, revising where you are, where you are heading and how to escape the cumbersome enterprise velocity matter.
Plus, this is from Harvard Business Review, it makes it more credible to share and grab attention of executives to help you get in front of the Customer.
Market research firms may have their place in your product development strategy, but today’s companies also need all their employees to have a deep, strategic understanding of their business and customers. And your employees can — and increasingly must — act as market researchers, transforming the company into what I’ve previously described as an “Insight-Driven Organization.”
Mahmut Canga 