So far in my career as a dev, I've got further and further away from direct user feedback and closer and closer to scrum...
There's a discussion to be had about correlation and causation as I'd say it's more to do with the dev/user relationship somehow being seen as 'bad' or wasteful or something!
I've gone back and forth between getting closer/farther away from talking to users directly. It usually depended on the org, particularly on who was running engineering at the time.
I remember early programmer memes involved stuff like "developers keep trying to account for dumb users, but users keep getting dumber". That kind of mentality is pretty widespread, but harmful in my opinion.
No matter how structured the process, not having direct access to users often resulted in scrambles because what was released did not go as well as intended. Meanwhile, even with a barebones process, things tended to run a lot smoother when engineers could talk to users as often as we wanted.
This 👆
So far in my career as a dev, I've got further and further away from direct user feedback and closer and closer to scrum...
There's a discussion to be had about correlation and causation as I'd say it's more to do with the dev/user relationship somehow being seen as 'bad' or wasteful or something!
I've gone back and forth between getting closer/farther away from talking to users directly. It usually depended on the org, particularly on who was running engineering at the time.
I remember early programmer memes involved stuff like "developers keep trying to account for dumb users, but users keep getting dumber". That kind of mentality is pretty widespread, but harmful in my opinion.
No matter how structured the process, not having direct access to users often resulted in scrambles because what was released did not go as well as intended. Meanwhile, even with a barebones process, things tended to run a lot smoother when engineers could talk to users as often as we wanted.