[Product Owner] Right back at it again
"...So here I am. I'm right back at it again. Just like I've always said: 'If you're too cool for school, I ain't here to make no friends.'
Listening to these lyrics written by a band called 'A Day to Remember', I realize that I'm just a few hours from going back to work after a long vacay. It's been a while since the last time I did something like that like being completely disconnected from my job, traveling to other countries, meeting new people, and getting to know different places.
During the vacation, I had a few moments where something reminded me of my job and, as a workaholic as I am(not bragging, read this as a complaint or even a call for help lol), all the experiences with many different apps, interfaces, and UXs from other countries were really something where I could take a few lessons here and there; it got me thinking things like 'hey, we already do that much better there' or even 'hmm, I might have committed a mistake taking that interaction for granted, this is looking like shit!'.
It was really funny to see how much other countries interact with common things like mobile apps, ordering food, trying to make a digital signature in a government app, or even opening and writing a form to complain about some service or restaurant on Yelp. As I said in other posts here, since I've been living my whole life in South America, I took a lot of stuff that we usually do as a 'common thing' like using mostly the same app for food ordering or transport which wasn't as common in NA as I thought it would be.
I also wanted to share a 'wow moment' I had that I definitely wasn't expecting: how important thinking about creating stuff with accessibility is for people that actually need those things. It's really rare to see here the stuff that helps people with visual impairments as much as I noticed in the US, and probably you would find it in most of the major capitals around the world. This is something that I never managed to think: How do these people interact with the things I'm building? Are they able to use it somehow? How does that software, those plugins, and accessibility modes behave on the stuff that I'm constantly shipping into production? Unfortunately, the daily routine makes us make some shitty tradeoffs, and those are ones that I need to confess that I actually NEVER paid attention to (or was even told to). I'll try to fix these things up in the near future and this will also be a new chapter for me. Let's see if by the end of 2026 at least I am able to talk about these topics with my coworkers and stakeholders."