There are many stories of design successes attributed to the right level of understanding of the customer. Product designers make decisions, daily, about how a product is going to look and perform. So, we need to really understand the customer. And, to really get the customer, engineers need to spend time with them. 

Sometimes, the business doesn’t want us to interact with the customer or doesn’t think it would be valuable. Objections include that we're not prepared for the user's environment, that we're too blunt or honest, or that we just overgeneralize what we learn, anyway. Or, there's a reluctance because of costs. Besides seeing these objections first hand, someone also listed them out in a published book! This shows that this is common across industries.

Is that fair to design engineers? No matter if it’s fair or not. We can prepare ourselves to address those objections. We talk about how we can prepare ourselves to self-advocate for more customer face time.

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ABOUT DIANNA
 Dianna Deeney is a product development process strategist with over 25 years of experience in regulated industries. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, where she helps product development teams make better decisions upstream — before costly design mistakes get built in.