Use your own product

A good craftsman is usually a good thinker, and one that understands and thinks about their own product a lot. This is probably generally true about building anything in this world, and software is no exception.

Applying for a tech job usually does not require you to be familiar with what the company does. And often times, you can do a fair job without using the products that you build outside of work. However, it is going to be difficult to do an excellent job either. From engineering perspective, it is the PM and the designer's job to define and design the product experience. So it is very obvious that these people need to understand the product inside out to tailor it for the users. So, if I am an engineer, my job is simply coding it according to the spec, right?

One well-known and common complaint from engineers is that the requirements and design keep changing. This is unavoidable given that the product has not been built, and different opinions go into the design all the time. So one important thing to keep in mind is that whatever requirements you see as an engineer, is just some temporary description of what certain people think how it should be. It is very crucial to know what the users would think about these terms.

The most approachable way to obtain this knowledge first hand, is simply turning everyone involved in the product building process into users of the product itself. You can only speak for the users when you are one of them. You don't have to fall in love with the product, everyone has their lifestyle and interest after all. But I simply don't see any excuse to not bother with average use of it.

I have become more engaged with LinkedIn as a product recently. And the more I used it, the more I found out how some things work well and some don't. It helped me exchange product and design ideas with my cross functional partners so much. Sometimes people call out that I have good product sense, and I tell them I only did one simple thing, "I just use LinkedIn often".

It should not be very difficult to spend some time using your own product on a regular basis. If it turns out to be so, you probably need to ask yourself what is wrong. And regardless of why, it is also time to think about a change. Life is short after all.