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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Developer's place in things
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
It is the job of the product manager, business development manager, and marketing manager to make it their business to know what the market wants and to get customer feedback.
If your product does not meet the needs of your market or is not satisfying your customer, you need to point the finger at the Marketing department first. If their research and PRD clearly articulated the market and customer needs, then they are off the hook. Then you have to find out why the development team didn't follow the PRD.
That's the definition of a product company, and it doesn't fully apply to in-house development. On the other hand, if the developers never see a customer, they aren't going to connect that well with the marketplace - take it from a Product Manager - there's no way that marketing, PM, and sales can convey all that meaning down to the developers without some losses in translation. Developers need to have opinions as well, and it's best if they are formed at least in part by interacting with customers.
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