Understanding the Extend Developer
In the last six months, I’ve worked on two exploratory research projects to shape a clearer picture of who the “Extend developer” is. There were many long-held assumptions about who we were building for, and very little recorded information to refer to. The knowledge gaps ranged from day-to-day responsibilities to technical skills to team structure. Even though our organization has relationships with many customers, there wasn’t a shared understanding across product, engineering, and design of who our users are.
Sounds vague. How’d you take that on?
I worked with my senior designer, John Cheng, to interview 9 customers across 4 companies. We chose interviews over a survey to help keep our findings open-ended, since we didn’t know what we didn’t know. While we called our work “persona” research, our goal was to create a presentation to share with the broader Extend team, which would have more detail than a typical persona one-pager. For my part, I created the research outline, led half of our customer conversations, and worked on both distilling insights and creating the presentation to communicate those insights.
What did you find out?
The biggest findings we had from our research was met with sighs of relief more than shock, which is a good thing. Since one of our goals was to separate truths about our developers from fictions, solidifying past assumptions is a success. Our findings tell a clear story about Extend developers, starting with what their teams are like (small and scrappy), to what their technical backgrounds are (mixed, either development or HR administration), to how they approach developing apps (in a word, iteratively).
We presented our findings to the product leadership team, to some of our engineering teams, and shared with the organization at large. While I relish feedback on the great graphics (major credit to my senior designer John there, I couldn’t have done that myself), seeing looks of recognition and contemplation on folks’ faces is the biggest reward for me.