Give engineers direct customer contact to build product intuition

We recruit 10 people and we put these people in front of the whole team, not just the PMs... All of a sudden you're not talking about a product manager, you're talking about a product team with product engineers.

Everyone can be a product engineer. They just need to be exposed to the right user context... It's 10 customers you know by name, you know their context, you know their problems.

What this created was this culture where all engineers and designers could consume that raw feed of direct points of customer with no gatekeeper, no process to access it, no pre-aggregation, right?

Engineers will go into that channel and react with a message with an email emoji, which means I'm going to email this customer and find out more, right? And they'll just email the customer and say, 'Hey, I'm the engineer that built this feature. I saw you said this specific thing. Can you tell me more? I'd love to understand.'

Ray Cao is discussing TikTok's practice of taking product managers and engineers on client visits to give them direct customer exposure.

We took them out with us. We're just inviting them together to join the force together to meet the clients and a lot of the company, if you want to meet APMs, if you want to meet the engineering leaders, it's literally once a year maybe, and also if you're investing a ton with some of the platforms. For us, I think it's always on to junior PMs, senior PMs and engineering leaders. We invited them together to these immersion trips recorded to really get face time with our clients, to really feel the heat.