Get to know your people
Get to know your people
When you use the word “users” with a certain type of, ahem, like, enlightened, happy person (the DevOps Reports calls them “high performers” - yay!), they quickly tell you that you should say “people.” Or even use something called “personas.” Hmm… Is that some free nitro coffee over there? HAVE FUN PERSONAING - SLURP, SLURP - GOTTA GO!
You probably aren’t surprised to hear that most software developers aren’t very close to hold on, I seem to have misplaced something, ah, here it is - people using their software as you’d think. Developers write features, they write to a spec or a story. They rarely talk with actual user…I’m sorry, people.
We all know they should be doing that - but who has the time?
A common theme I hear from more successful organizations is that they, well, do talk to the people using their software: when a Pivotal team was writing an app for kitchen workers, they went (at 4am!) and watched them work; when Duke Energy was writing an app for line-workers, they went and talked with them; when Dicks’ Sporting Goods wanted to nail omni-channel, they went to the store to see what people were doing.
It sounds crazy, I guess, but it seems to work. Deeper in the stack, operations people who start to treat developers as their users - hey, I know, in this case: - customers seem to do a better job too. That’s the main point of a talk I gave today at the CF Summit EU.
I’ve given this talk before, but I wanted to focus in on just that part: product managing ops. That’s the only part most people have commented on after previous deliveries, and, really, I’m kind of sketchy on the details.
Original content
I finally launched a new podcast today, with Rick Clark one of my Pivotal co-workers. We’ve been discussing how to get “The Business” more involved in THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION and we finally deiced to record our conversations. In this first episode, we lay out the general idea and speculate why there’s such a gap between IT and the rest of the organization, “The Business.”
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