Focusing on the human side of things

[Jeremy Duncan]

Have you ever gone into a fine dining experience and mentioned that you were hungry and pondered what the waiter/waitress's response was? Sometimes the response is, "what are you in the mood for". Sometimes the response is, "here's what our specials for the evening are". Neither response is wrong, but one considers your desires more than the other. 

I often-times see my role as a Pre-Sales Solution Architect as an expert of a menu of items in an enterprise cloud software "restaurant". And I can either take on the role of "expert of my menu" or I can take an empathetic approach that considers my customers' appetite before sharing my expertise of the menu that they can pick from. 

I get the honor to work with our top 125 customers on some of their most unique challenges. I get appetites that pull from a menu of staple items, and some appetites that are eclectic in nature. Going into the more eclectic scenarios, it takes a bit of understanding of what the customer is expecting from their experience. Are they looking for off-the-shelf solutions that fits a very defined use-case or are they looking for something that doesn't quite fit the standard cuisine approach?

Either way, I find that if I focus in on what motivates my customer and what is hiding behind their challenge, it makes the solution that comes out the other side much more impactful and meaningful. There are many great courses out there on Human Centered Design and Design Thinking that help you think about challenges from this perspective. I recommend any architects in this field to educate themselves on this mode of thinking. 

https://aj-smart.teachable.com/

https://www.designthinkersacademy.com/usa/

[jcmings]

Great point! Human centered designed (HCD) is super important and it's a methodology that I would encourage all teams to use when interacting with clients. By taking the people-first approach, you're able to understand problems at a more fundamental level, which allows your solutions to be more complete. 

It's often tricky to mesh together HCD with the most scalable designs, but I've found that if you need to customize, you should customize in a way enables configuration. One example I can think of -- one of our clients wanted a custom landing page with tiles and links to different resources. While we built this from scratch, we set it up in a way that was dynamic -- meaning back-end users could update records on a table (e.g. changing the link or changing the name of a tile) and see those changes right away on the landing page. We put the power in the hands of the end-user!