Are We Building Products People Actually Want?

We ship features. We squash bugs. We push updates.

But in the rush to deploy, iterate, and scale… have we stopped to ask:
Are we building things that actually matter to the people using them?

In tech, we often get so absorbed in the how—frameworks, architecture, performance benchmarks—that we forget to ask why. Why are we building this? Who is it for? What problem does it truly solve?

“Working software” doesn’t always mean “valuable software.”
It’s easy to fall in love with the code. We’ve all had those moments where we’re proud of the cleanest component, the tightest query, the cleverest abstraction. But outside our bubble, the user doesn’t care how elegant the logic is. They care whether it works for them—if it saves time, reduces stress, solves a real-world problem, or just makes their life a little easier.

This isn’t a rant about UX or product strategy—it’s a call for developer empathy.

We sit on a goldmine of technical skill, yet sometimes fail to connect it with human need. And when tech becomes disconnected from people, we risk building solutions in search of a problem.

Let’s Start a Conversation
Have you ever built something technically amazing that no one used?

How often do you talk to actual users before writing code?

What does “impact” look like in your role—beyond just clean code or shipped features?

Let’s not just build faster. Let’s build better—by putting people at the center of what we create.

Comments

[Victor Dolsan]

Hello!

I mean, I totally get the fact that users don't care about how "elegant the logic is" UNTIL they need to enhance some feature. Only in this moment some of them realize that "Ok, maybe I need to think about what my developers are keep telling me of that "clean-code" thing".
The issue is in most companies the other sectors do not realize how complicated programming actually is. I've had this situation at my current customer where one of the Business Analysts watched my presentation on REST API and the guy mentioned on our daily meeting: "Oh man, I had no idea that create a software could be so complicated. I recommend everyone here to watch the presentation".
I mean, the customer only stops to really listen to us when something goes terribly wrong.
We might be annoying for keep trying to create "the best" architecture, but we are actually right.