The Product Momentum team continues the series of conversations that we recorded at INDUSTRY Global; in today’s episode, Bukky Adebayo and Rye Castillo join Sean and Sean to talk about the challenges and opportunities that come with building products for technical audiences. Bukky is Chief of Staff, Digital Customer Experience at Autodesk, and Rye is a Design Lead at Render (a self-described “curious generalist.”).

The discussion revolves around challenges in product design, particularly in technical environments (where users are often tech-savvy developers), and emphasizes the importance of collaboration and empathy in the development process.

“The overarching theme of our talk is ‘collaboration,’” Rye says, “with special emphasis on including your engineers as part of the team and not people you have to fight against. In engineering-heavy organizations, sometimes it feels like you’re fighting an ‘us versus them’ uphill battle.”

This kind of environment reflects one of the challenges teams face, especially in larger organizations. Silos bubble up, and developers tend to retreat and narrow their focus on product specs. This hinders creativity and innovation. But good things happen when teams collaborate. Bukky suggests having developers sit in on usability tests and in conversations with customers; as much as developers want to be right, they want even more to be heard – to feel like they’re part of the solution.

Be sure to catch the entire episode with Bukky and Rye to learn about some of the tactics they’ve used to encourage collaboration, tear down functional silos, and build powerful products for their technical audiences.

In his blog, Maximizing Developer Value: The Intersection of Tech and Business Domains, ITX Senior Solutions Architect John Roets offers the following advice to his fellow developers:

“If you fail to see beyond technical skill as what makes developers and teams valuable, you’ve got it wrong. Developer and organizational attitudes, structures, and operational models continue to (mistakenly) reinforce the idea that developers are mere ‘order takers,’ fungible assets to be moved around from domain to domain where the work is.”

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