30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
I would add that even a good designer needs real consumer feedback (preferably contract tests!) early, to iron out all the use cases they would never think of themselves, and to work hard on retaining flexibility in the implementation behind the API so it can evolve along with those consumers needs. Few things suck worse than having to maintain a poor API that neither customers nor the product team actually want, but are stuck with through sunk costs (they often assume..)
I would add that even a good designer needs real consumer feedback (preferably contract tests!) early, to iron out all the use cases they would never think of themselves, and to work hard on retaining flexibility in the implementation behind the API so it can evolve along with those consumers needs. Few things suck worse than having to maintain a poor API that neither customers nor the product team actually want, but are stuck with through sunk costs (they often assume..)
I totally agree with you. :)