More Perspective
I’ve talked about perspective before. Your point of view is a huge component of how you look at a situation. Let’s say you’re a fish. And let’s say you needed to navigate from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. A map would be a good thing. It would really help you get from Portland to Portland. But for a fish the map wouldn’t look like most of the maps you’re used to seeing. It would look a lot more like this:
Lots of ocean and a bit of coastline. (Yes, there’s too much land showing in Africa and major rivers aren’t shown, but you get the idea). Because that’s what’s important to fish. They don’t know, or care, what’s happening in Kansas or the central Asia. As far as they’re concerned those places might as well be on the moon. They have an impact on the world, but when getting from Portland to Portland they just don’t matter.
Working on software can be a lot like that. As the developer you care a lot about the internals. How the pieces fit together. How they communicate. How a change in one place impacts another. Your customers, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. If it’s an application they care about how many button clicks it takes them to do their task. If it’s a library they care about how good the documentation is and how consistent the API is. In general, customers want you to do the thing that makes their lives easier. The only time they care about making your life easier is when it helps them get what they want.
There are lots of ways that this impacts us, but one of the most important is how we communicate with our customers. When communicating with customers the key is to speak in their language. To talk about the benefits they get. How their life will be easier/better. Not that run time is ½ or that memory required is lower, but that they’ll be able to run twice as many things in the same time and it will cost them less. That’s customer benefit. Not “We’ve re-built the system as a set of microservices to reduce hard coupling”, but “Our new microservice architecture lets makes the system more resilient to network and hardware issues and lets us respond to customer needs faster”. Which one do you think customers want more?
So next time you need to explain something to someone and you draw a picture, make sure it’s from their perspective.
