The product is never as important as the support

You can’t vibe code your way to a great customer experience.

You need the user flows and the user journeys, but you also need to understand the system the user operates in. How much of their job do they spend in your tools? Is it the essential part of their job that they’ll spend time customising to their needs, or is it the necessary admin they need to get out of the way quickly to get back to what they need to do?

And sometimes the same product can be both, to different people in the organisation, or at different points in the week for the same person. The announcement email for the new product is exciting and gives them purpose; the email with all the receipts for the conference that allowed them to perfect the message is the annoying thing they have to do, especially with all those separate dinners and gifts for the research workshops.

Writing code isn’t a skill everyone has, but working code isn’t the most important thing a developer does. It never has been. The code exists for a purpose and exists inside a system, so the developer needs to know why the code exists and what other code is in conversation with it. We don’t think the carpenter’s job is cutting wood, but without measuring and cutting the wood, they couldn’t get the legs to fit the seat, and without those things connecting in the right way, they couldn’t build a chair for you to sit on.

Some companies have perfected the mass production of the legs and the seats, and they flat-pack them for you to assemble at home, but there’s still a human in the loop to understand how they fit together and provide the instructions on how to do so; there’s a human who understands why it exists and what weight it needs to bear, and how it fits with the table. And if anything goes wrong, there should be a human who can help to fix it, because the human understands that you need that chair for next week when your family are arriving, and there’s not enough space at your dining table.

Products succeed or fail not because of the engineering, or how they’re cut, although that can be a critical part of the success. A product succeeds when it meets customers where they are. And gives them something they didn’t know they needed. And helps them when things don’t go as expected.

Taking the human out of the loop takes the customer out of the loop.