That said, I am actually actively trying to grow my engineers into somewhat of mini product managers themselves.

It’s going quite great so far— the more they get exposed to users and problems, the more they are taking ownership of their work.

I don’t hear things like “the user doesn’t understand” anymore, but rather “I tried to make it clear to anyone who uses it”.

They started coming up with features and changes that were way more brilliant than anything I could come up with. And also interviewing developers (who are also target users for us), performing small tests to validate hypothesis, and so on.

And they also started making little jokes in customer calls to keep users’ mood up! Some users even thanked us for letting them test our early “broken” work-in-progress :D and apologized for not testing well enough. The first time I saw this, it was crazy!

I am so incredibly proud of them!