# Are we building the right thing? Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/adventures-in-devops/are-we-building-the-right-thing Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/adventures-in-devops/are-we-building-the-right-thing.md Podcast: [Adventures in DevOps](https://stenobird.com/podcast/adventures-in-devops) Published: 2025-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://adventuresindevops.com/episodes/258-building-the-right-thing-ux-engineering-collaboration Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/68846715/download.mp3 Processing state: failed JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/adventures-in-devops/episodes/are-we-building-the-right-thing Duration seconds: 2162 ## Resource Share Episode ⸺ Episode Sponsor: Incident.io - https://dev0ps.fyi/incidentio                     Elise, VP and Head of UX at Unleash, joins us to talk all about UX. Self identifying as probably "The annoying lady in the room" and a career spanning nearly 30 years—starting before "UX" was even a job title — joins us to dismantle the idea that User Experience is just about moving pixels around. Here we debate the friction between engineering, sales, and the customer. We get to the bottom of whether or avoiding end-user interaction, understand, and research is a career-limiting move for staff+ engineers. Or should you avoid forcing a world-class developer to facilitate a call with a non-technical user if it makes them uncomfortable?           Warren calls out the "Pit of Failure" often faced by teams as they seek to introduce feature flags. They can become a crutch, leading teams to push untested code into production simply because they can toggle it off—a scenario he calls the "pit of failure".           And Elise dives into a great story recounting her consulting days where a company spent a fortune on a branding agency that demanded conflicting "primary colors" for a mainframe application used 8 hours a day. Her low-tech solution to prove them wrong? Listen and find out, this episode is all about bringing UX to Engineering.           💡 Notable Links:           Ladder of Leadership - Book: Turn the Ship Around! 🎯 Picks:           Warren - Growth.Design Case Stu… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/adventures-in-devops/episodes/are-we-building-the-right-thing/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/adventures-in-devops/are-we-building-the-right-thing.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.