Interlude - Index of

Managing Engineers | 105
A friend of mine ran a two-day conference for hundreds of
engineers, and afterward she asked several attendees for feedback.
Some of the criticism she got surprised her. One engineer
complained that the lunch line would have moved faster
if it had gone down both sides of the buffet table. “Were they
even paying attention to the presentations that were the actual
point of the conference?” she asked me. I tried to reassure her:
“You don’t understand how engineers think. We spot problems
and try to fix them. If the layout of the food line was the
worst problem they found to work on, then you had a spectacular
meeting.”
••
After taking over from Helen, I realized that we were missing
a third style of thinking. Customer-centric thinking is
the ability to identify customer pain and figure out what it
takes to relieve it. At first,
James and I and the other
engineers had great intu-
Understanding Engineers
ition about our customers,
The pessimist sees the glass as
because we were designing
products for people much
half empty. The optimist sees the
glass as half full. The engineer
says, “This glass is twice as big
like ourselves—small groups as it needs to be.”
of engineers doing hard-
••
ware and software develop- Q: What’s the difference between
ment. Our intuition broke an introverted engineer and an
down as we broadened our extroverted engineer?
customer base to include
A: The extroverted engineer looks
banks, government agencies,
and other people who
at your shoes when he talks
to you.