Your engineering team shouldn’t just be building stuff. They should be building your business.

It’s not enough for them to deliver quality features on schedule. Building quality software on time is great, but if you’re not building the right software your efforts will be wasted and your organization will have one less oar in the water. Or perhaps no oars in the water at all.

To build the right software a few key conditions need to be in place. At the very least you must have organizational context, alignment, and user context. We will focus on the last, user context, for this post.

If your engineering team does not understand your users it’s nearly impossible to know what problems need to be solved, let alone build the right solutions. Without user context, you are forced to rely on second-hand information or worse, speculation, which increases the potential for wasted effort.

To acquire deep user context, listen to users on a weekly basis. Schedule a 15-20 minute meeting with an existing or potential end user every week and encourage them to tell stories. Don’t just focus on technology or problems that they have with software, ask them about different parts of their workflow to uncover problems you haven’t yet considered.

It’s tempting to do this listening at first until you feel you have a grasp of your users’ problems, then to let it lapse while you build. This is a temptation you have to resist for two reasons.

First, you can never understand your users and their problems deeply enough. Understanding your users better than anyone else in the world puts you in a dominant position relative to your competitors. Even when you believe you know everything there is to know about them, you can dig deeper. That kind of depth can only be achieved over time, with continuous and consistent listening.

Second, the world stubbornly refuses to stand still. There is no better way to stay on top of changing conditions and problems than by talking to your users regularly.

If your team is constantly listening to users they will have the context they need to propel your business forward.