To finish off this “someone’s gotta” series, there’s one last item that you need to consider. And yes, software folks, this is where I’m talking to you, too.
Someone has to use your product. Your airplane, your software, your fancy apple-slicer.
This feels very straightforward: of course someone has to use it, that’s why we make products to begin with! I know in software and many other industries there are whole teams that work on user interfaces and testing and all those fun things.
But I feel like we can expand this just beyond the “classic” user, especially for the more complex things we make. Your user isn’t just the person at the very end of the chain who buys the polished, finished product.
Your user is the people you work with, now or in the future, who will have to look at your CAD or code or calculations and understand what the heck is going on and why you made the design choices you did.
Your user is the folks testing every aspect of the product—in aviation, it’s the people out there putting the aircraft through its paces, making sure all the modes and settings and flaps and everything else is operating just the way it’s supposed to.
Your user is the maintainers and mechanics and techs who keep things operating well after they’ve left the production floor, who replace engines and servos over and over again.
And yes, your user is the final beneficiary of all the work you and countless others have done. You might have spent mere months contributing to a project, but they may be working with it for years to come. A design choice you made for a 1% optimization may, after hundreds of operating cycles, become the biggest pain in the butt.
There’s definitely solid overlap here with the point of the “someone’s gotta make it” email: that for all your digital efforts, at some point in the process someone will be using their own hands to create a physical manifestation of your work. But considering how easy it is to get siloed into our little engineering corners, seeing everything on a 27” screen, I think it bears repeating.
At some point, someone who isn’t you is going to interact with your work in a different way than you have been. So do your best to design, plan, and document, with that fellow human in mind.