I went to visit another customer recently and discovered something very interesting about them. Their first hire was not a Software Engineer or even a Product Manager, but a User Experience specialist. How novel…thinking about the user first.
This is novel, because at most companies that build software, the first hire beyond the founders is usually an Engineer to write the code that supports the founders’ vision of the product and how it should work. Most founders are not experts in user experience. They may have been users once, but they are not likely the user that they are trying to serve now.
Making a User Experience specialist an early hire insures that even in the very early versions, the product will be focused on the needs of users and that product will not be built piecemeal.