A quick reminder: This Friday at 17:00 CET (Europe) / 8:00 AM PT (Americas), I’ll be doing a free, live video Q&A session answering your DevOps technology questions. Space is limited! Register up now!

How often do you talk to the users of the product your team builds?

If you’re building an eCommerce site, how often do you talk to the shoppers who shop on your site?

If you build CI/CD pipelines, how often do you talk to the developers whose code the pipeline executes?

If you automate stock trades, how often do you talk to investors?

If you’re not doing these things, how do you know your efforts are producing the results your users need and want?

If you want to build good, useful products, this isn’t the job of a user researcher. It’s your job as a developer, product owner, UX designer, or any other product contributor.

It can (and should) take many forms: Talk to your users before you build the product, to learn what to build. Talk to your users as you’re building the product for usability testing. Talk to your users after you’ve built the product, for validation that you built the right thing, and to learn how to iterate.