Be Empathetic · Clief Notes

Be Empathetic

Twelve months ago i'd never touched code. i'm a marketer and a teacher. A head full of ideas and no technical training whatsoever.

So when i started building learning resources for the college i work at, i did the obvious thing. i wrote prompts. Good ones. Then i saved them into projects. Then i had a different set of prompts for every part of the process, one for this, one for that. It worked. Sort of. It was tedious and the output was right most of the time but not all of the time.

(half the words people used for this stuff went straight over my head, by the way. "agentic", "RAG". i used to nod quietly and google it later.)

Anyway. The thing that actually moved me forward wasn't technical at all.

It's that i ask a lot of questions. And since i can't lean on knowing how the code "should" work, i ask them from everyone's seat instead. When i plan a stage i'll sit in the chair of the learner, then the assessor, then the auditor, then the poor admin who has to upload the thing. What does each of them need. What breaks for them.

That's the whole edge. Empathy, basically. Asking what the person on the other end actually needs before you build a thing for them.

The tools came out better because of it, not despite me not being technical. (Learnbuilt, the thing i've been building, basically exists because i kept asking those questions until the answers had to live somewhere.)

So if you're in here feeling behind on the technical side, i'm not sure that's the gap you think it is. The questions are the job. The code is downstream of the questions.

anyone else find the non-technical background is the part that actually carries the build?

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