Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

The gist

It has been reported that Ashley Rolfmore argues designers and product people are too often trying to “systematize” human conversation — slapping on words like framework, system, or the trendy “socio‑technical system” — instead of actually listening. The piece, first shared on Rolfmore’s site and circulated on Hacker News, calls out a familiar malaise in tech: people aren’t talking to people, and when they do, they aren’t listening. Simple? Not really. Comfortable? Absolutely.

The problem, broken down

Rolfmore names a bunch of predictable traps: confusing listening with doing what someone says, assuming “technical” is a single thing, projecting your own resources or knowledge onto others, and treating groups as homogenous. Jobs To Be Done and empathy maps get a nod — useful tools, but not magic. The emotional punch lands where it always does: teams avoid the awkward, messy work of real conversation because it’s harder than inventing another better‑sounding process.

Why this matters

So what’s the harm? Missed insights, wasted requirements, and software that solves yesterday’s problem for today’s changed people. In short: you lose the juicy stuff. Rolfmore’s point is less about throwing out frameworks and more about resisting the siren song of engineering fixes for fundamentally human problems. Want better products? Listen. Ask, then listen some more. It’s old advice, but worth repeating — especially in an era of shiny tooling and AI that tempts us to automate empathy.

Sources: rolfmore.com, Hacker News