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[perkiset]

Years ago, PinkHat owned a company that built an accounting piece of software for the travel industry. In fact, PinkHat was one of the architects of that software. It was very user-centric and had novel ideas about how to interact both with the screen and  accounting files.

The main programmer (who later came to work for me after PinkHat purchased my consulting firm) had very different ideas. HE KNEW what needed to be done, those silly users did not. And it was horrible. We see this sort of behavior every day in contemporary software still ... clearly the techbois thought they knew what was best and we are left asking, "do the programmers actually even use this sh!t?!?!?!"

So PinkHat changed the job description of the programmer. She sent him to San Diego where he worked AS an accountant for 30 days.

He came back a changed man. Understanding now what it really took for his user to ACTUALLY make use of what he put together, he changed his developmental paradigm substantially and the project went on to be a great success, eventually being sold lock-stock-and-barrel to a consortium of airlines.

So on to my money and mouth.

Some of our cloud users report incredible speed and then very slow performance. It's difficult to track. So here's what I'm doing: Rather than my native apps, I'm going to be using Thunderbird off our cloud on my iPad for the foreseeable future. In fact I'm using Firefox off our cloud on my iPad to do this post right now. My intention is to be totally in tune with what our users experience, at all times. Knowing that I can switch from public-facing, simple user email issues to the God perspective in our cloud instantaneously, it may help us see where things get peanutbuttery at times. As I've developed software over the last 35 years it's what I've naturally done - but I had forgotten that lesson in deploying our cloud. Although I've tested and tested, I've not lived the cloud, like our users do.

My suggestion to you: Try this example. Live by your sword. Be willing to experience every pain your users have, all the time and every time, in the service of making your systems absolutely as tight as possible. I mean, if it pisses you off that you can't get your email, you're certainly going to fix it

Your users will love you for it.

[kurdt]

This is called dogfooding. It's something that most of the successful companies do either naturally or by evolution. And if you don't do dogfooding and you are still success in your niche there probably isn't very serious competition I can't remember where or by who I heard it but I remember reading that improvements in Win7 mobile OS were contributed a lot to team's dogfooding. It's hard to design anything good if you don't know exactly the problem you are trying to solve

[perkiset]

Cheers Kurdt, have never heard it called that before.