# Engineers Are Too Far From Users

The further an engineer sits from the user, the more likely they are to build something nobody asked for. Hence founders make this mistakes.

Published: June 15, 2026


Yesterday, I was on a phone call with a friend of mine. We were talking about our businesses and how we want to avoid doing sales. Now, he is and I too at a stage where we need to do cold calling, we need to reach out to the user, we have to talk to the user to actually start understanding from them what works, what are their requirements, things like that. I understand this should be the first thing we should be doing. We make the most common mistake -- not talking to the users first.

Now, we both are software developers, and sales is definitely not our forte. We both laughed at our hesitation and the lack of experience in this field. We were tossing the ideas what we can do to actually not to talk to the users, jokingly, but we as an engineer... I then realise, have been kept away from the user so much that it's now our uncomfortable territory. I honestly do not understand how a team that serve users come to this situation where we interact users so rarely. This job primarily belongs to the sales team, the product team, and in some cases, the customer support team. But this is really weird that the engineers are kept away from talking to the people who use their product. Because I have seen engineers giving great idea because the builders really understand the capabilities of their system.

The company that I'm [building](https://selfhost.dev/),  I will not make it so that engineers sits away from the users. I think this should be one of the topmost priority and this is one of the things I will be looking in our future engineers who are open to talk to the users. This hesitation at the organization level should not persist. There are certain kind of hierarchy as we grow will be formed for sure, but I promise that hierarchy won't come in the way of we being close to the user. It should be the part of their job description to talking at least once a week with our users. The objective would be to actually understand their behavior very well, their pain points very well, and what they are trying to do eventually.

Now, until that happens, I'm still at the phase where I'm early at talking to the users, and that hesitation and that reluctance is still there. Dropping that email, not getting anything in reply, that usually I'm not so much used to. Most of the days, I have been in the side where someone sells to me. But now the tables have turned. I am the one who now reach out to the people, and I need to find a good way to do this sales part. I think eventually, if I can make it fun in a way where I can find it intriguing to drop emails, find it exciting to tell about the product, I think that is when the habit will start to form. But obviously, a big part of the sale is facing the rejection.

It is never fun to face any kind of rejections. In our entirety of life, we do understand as human, as people, rejection hurts. As a first time founder, I need to wrap my head around it because it's gonna happen quite a lot. So the next question I ask, how to make rejection a good thing in general, while also being a little persistent in selling the idea or selling the product? There might be two kind of rejections, I think. First kind of rejection where I am targeting the wrong customer entirely. I think these kind of rejections will be easy to maneuver because feedback will be polarising. But the next kind of rejection, where I can see the user can be a potential client, and the sheer amount of hard work required for them to get offboard of their existing solution and start using ours is something that requires a good amount of energy in general.

If I have to make rejections a bit fun, first, I'll try to communicate so that I get early feedback quickly. It's filtering out the wrong audience. The next sort of people are the interesting ones. They can become my clients because they use an existing tool for which I'm building a better version of it. If your product isn't better I think you will be in a very bad place. In order to tell if your product is better or not, you need to start demoing. If you have talked to the users early the demo most likely provide some good value to the audience. If you have not, then be open minded to change quite a lot of things in your product.

> Rejection is fun only if you are open-minded to change.

One more good thing about rejections that they are feedbacks. I'm also a big believer of feedback. And thinking it in terms of this will be really helpful for me. Another thing that will likely help me is to gamify this experience. I don't know how people in sales do it currently but gamers do face this quite a lot. If the cost of doing something is almost negligible then we do it repeatedly even if the feedback is likely not in your favour. At this point, sales looks like grunt work and I need to find ways to remove as much as toil for me.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this but at least I can make it fun.