Good software starts with understanding people. A look at why the person who knows your client best might be one of the most valuable people in your development team.
A few months ago, Nadia and I spent a full day at the Digital Media Centre (DMC) in Barnsley, running discovery sessions. We were updating an app they already use, and before touching a line of code, we wanted to understand how people actually use it. Today, we were back, testing the new version.
Nadia is our Service Coordinator. For the past few years she's been the person at awesome. in touch with the DMC most often, weekly and sometimes daily.
That means she knows things no brief ever captures. Who uses which part of the app. What they do when the official process is too slow. Which screen everyone avoids, and why. Who to ask when something doesn't add up.
She's not a programmer, and she's not a product manager. She's been in the room for every stage of this project anyway, because what she knows about how people actually use the software is worth more than anything we could guess from a spec.
If you're building software, look for that person in your team. They're often not in the technical meetings, and they should be.
There's a lot of pressure right now to make everything faster with AI. Some of that is hype, and there may well be a correction when the bubble bursts. But the technology is here to stay, and we use it every day.
What it can't do is sit in a room with the people who'll use the thing, notice what they're not saying, and care whether it works for them. That's still a human job, and it's where most of the value in good software comes from.
If every business races for productivity and forgets who the software is for, we'll all end up building faster versions of the wrong thing.
What I'm proudest of at awesome. isn't any one project. It's that people here care about the work and step across their job titles to make it better. A service coordinator shaping an app. A developer sitting in on client calls. Everyone bringing what they know.
That's the bit worth protecting.
Thank you for reading