When founding engineers are heads down building the product, it's easy to lose sight of the ultimate WHY – the customers. Many startup CEOs, CTOs, and even engineers often believe that customer interactions are best left to the sales, product, or customer support teams. However, it is vital for founding engineers or startup engineers to actively engage in regular conversations with customers, otherwise you’re coding in a vacuum… and you’ll never build what customers need.
You don’t progress as a founding engineer by coding alone in the dark.
The short-term costs are obvious:
It’s uncomfortable for engineers to step outside of their comfort zone and talk to customers
Time spent meeting with customers is time taken away from coding
Context switching to handle customer meetings, calls, or issues directly can reduce productivity
But here are some benefits that outweigh these costs in the long run.
1. Builds Customer Empathy and Engagement
By talking directly to customers, engineers better understand what truly matters to their end users. This firsthand knowledge fosters empathy, enabling engineers to prioritize work better and develop solutions that cater to the customers' real needs and pain points. As a result, engineers feel more connected and engaged with their work, knowing that their efforts are making a tangible impact on someone’s life.
2. Deepens Understanding of Business Context
Leading customer engagements exposes engineers to the business context surrounding their products. They become aware of how their technology fits into the larger picture, understanding the target market, and the startup's value proposition. This broader perspective enhances decision-making, enabling engineers to align their technical solutions with the company's strategic goals.
3. Streamlines Communication and Reduces Misinterpretation
Without direct customer conversations, critical feedback and requirements can get lost in a game of telephone, moving from the customer to the CEO, CTO, and finally to the engineering team. This can lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations even under the best scenarios. Each layer of telephone will be clouded by the listener’s own internal beliefs and biases. Engineers can eliminate these intermediaries by engaging directly with customers, ensuring clear and accurate communication.
4. Accelerates the Iterative Process
Customer conversations reduce feedback loops and speed up the iterative development process. Engineers can quickly validate assumptions, gather insights, and make necessary adjustments, ultimately leading to a faster product development cycle and staying ahead of the competition.
5. Become High Leverage for CEOs and CTOs
When engineers take on customer conversations, it lightens the load for the CEOs and CTOs. Instead of being a bottleneck for information flow, the founders can focus on higher-leverage tasks like strategic planning, building partnerships, and guiding the overall vision of the startup. This also allows the founding engineers to level up and become leaders within the business.
By leading customer engagements, founding engineers take ownership of the customer journey and business outcomes. They’re not only involved in the conversations about how to build something but what to build and why. For those with ambitions of becoming engineering leaders, product leaders, or founders themselves, this is an indispensable skill.
At an early-stage startup, your success depends on your ability to understand the customers’ needs, iterate quickly to deliver a solution to their pain points, and level up your team members so they can continue to grow the business and help move it forward. So even though it’s painful in the short term, every founding engineer should embrace customer conversations because it enriches the product development process and empowers them to be influential drivers of the company’s growth and success.