This is nearly always missed in my experience. A good product is "winning" for your engineering team, if you do not have a good product, you have lost. Would you have made a good product if your team spent less time in the locker room(meetings)? Maybe, and certainly more time on the field probably will increase your odds of winning, but it won't ensure it.
This always takes me to USE YOUR PRODUCT. If you don't use your product, you'll never know if it is good. My team builds internal tools for our support folks, we also use these tools every day to try and answer our own questions about internal problems. Are the tools we make getting better? Well, just consult our "How long does it take to answer X?" KPI, we have a set of known common problems; if our support folks are spending less time figuring out the answer to these gold standards, our product is improving, if they're spending longer, we've regressed and we need to change something.
I'll grant that making internal tools grants us a lot of gimmes, we're not tasked with taking advantage of users, and we can spend time training users intensively on new releases, but the underlying principle is the same; a chef will never know if a recipe is good without tasting it himself, and you'll never know if your team is successful if you don't know if the product you've created is good.
> This always takes me to USE YOUR PRODUCT. If you don't use your product, you'll never know if it is good.
This is a bit absolutist. Sure, use your product when it makes sense like in your case but many people here build things for user groups they don't belong to (constantly).
Besides: are you hitting all the same use cases your users are and at the same rate?
This advice always sounds nice but it's impossible to apply for lots of people. More generically applicable advice is that you should be acutely aware of your users real(!) experiences. This can be by using the product or by making sure the team sees and hears raw user feedback. Preferably combined with data that helps prioritize.
There's nothing like hearing the frustration in someone's voice when they are trying to accomplish something and _your product_ is holding them back. (well, except for experiencing it yourself and then we've circled back ;) )
> many people here build things for user groups they don't belong to (constantly).
A root of the problem. If you have no appreciation or desire to solve a problem well, you won't. There are very few pieces of software written for users that you can't figure out a way to use. If you can't use it, observe users, if you can't observe, ask users, if you can't ask, instrument their use. To your absolutist point, yes, it is not strictly an absolute, it is an encouragement to push as far along the empathy spectrum as you can.
This always takes me to USE YOUR PRODUCT. If you don't use your product, you'll never know if it is good. My team builds internal tools for our support folks, we also use these tools every day to try and answer our own questions about internal problems. Are the tools we make getting better? Well, just consult our "How long does it take to answer X?" KPI, we have a set of known common problems; if our support folks are spending less time figuring out the answer to these gold standards, our product is improving, if they're spending longer, we've regressed and we need to change something.
I'll grant that making internal tools grants us a lot of gimmes, we're not tasked with taking advantage of users, and we can spend time training users intensively on new releases, but the underlying principle is the same; a chef will never know if a recipe is good without tasting it himself, and you'll never know if your team is successful if you don't know if the product you've created is good.