Driving Innovation with Engineer Input: Effective Techniques for Gathering Product Insights
By tapping into the engineering mind our organizations can unlock a wealth of ideas for improving our products and services. Engineers are often overlooked as sources of product innovation as their skills are mistakenly thought of as more technical than creative. In this article, we’re going to cover methods your organization can implement to gather engineering input to help unlock creativity and foster product innovation.
Conduct Surveys
Conduct surveys or questionnaires specifically targeted at engineers to gather their input on product features, usability, and performance. Here are a few questions we can ask our engineers.
- What features would you like to see added to improve our product?
- How intuitive is the product UI/UX from an engineering perspective?
- Are you aware of any performance issues or bugs that are annoying to you?
- What are the challenges you face while working on this product (ie. technical debt, difficult debugging environment, or lack of helpful error logging like Sentry)?
- Are there any particular 3rd party tools or integrations that would make the product more useful to customers or engineers?
- What metrics or performance benchmarks do you consider important?
Establish Regular Meetings
Establish regular meetings or workshops dedicated to seeking engineers’ opinions on product specifications, technical requirements, or challenges they foresee. This provides an opportunity for engineers to voice their opinions and establish direct communication channels with product managers or design teams to exchange ideas and contribute to project roadmaps. If you’re the person in charge of overseeing these meetings it’s important to encourage active participation and provide a safe environment for new and controversial ideas to be shared.
Beta Testing Programs
Encourage engineers to participate in beta testing programs, where they can try out new products or features and provide feedback based on their expertise. Too often we separate the engineers from the actual end-users. Involving engineering in the beta testing program gives them a chance to interact with the end-users and feel the pain points they are experiencing with our products and services. One of my favorite phases of mobile software projects is when we release to TestFlight and begin hearing feedback from beta users. Often we hear that a particular feature is less than intuitive and our engineering team gets to iterate quickly on customer feedback.
Establish Knowledge Sharing Platforms
Foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing platforms within the organization, such as internal forums or Slack channels, where engineers can openly discuss and contribute their ideas. At Bixly we have a Slack channel called Rocket-Science where the engineering team can ask for help with any technical challenges they’re facing or share their experiences with new technologies they love working with. AI is a common topic of conversation of late, but the point is it’s a collaborative safe space for knowledge sharing.
Conclusion
Our engineering teams are a deep well of knowledge and expertise that can greatly contribute to the success of product development and innovation. My goal for this article was to give readers a simple and manageable framework for gathering meaningful input from their engineering teams. Such discussions provide a platform for engineers to brainstorm collectively and offer valuable input on the product roadmap. If you have any further questions about how to get the best out of your engineering team I would love to connect.
