It was a day like any other for me as a software developer at Uberflip.  

I was working on a feature request when my co-worker Tyler, from the Customer Success team, came over and asked for my help on a call he had later in the day. The client was having some trouble with a feature I created, and to make sure the call went smoothly he requested my presence.

Since starting at Uberflip, close to two years ago, I've become accustomed to this process. The client either has some very technical questions or wants a developer in on the call for assurance. Each call is usually pretty similar, but this one was different.  Tyler asked if I wanted to sit in on the start of the call even though I was only needed for a portion of it.  

Why not, I figured.

I walked into the room and Tyler had a sheet of paper that looked like a template I'd never seen before.  I scanned the piece of paper and the questions read:

• "Content Marketing Goals/Objectives (how do they plan to use Uberflip)"
• "Timeline and Key People Involved"
• "How will you measure success?"
• "Questions to answer:"

One question in particular stood out to me: how do they plan to use Uberflip?

Working as a developer for a SaaS company, you like to think you know how customers use the product because you had a hand in building it. The product performs certain actions so the platform is used for a specific reason.  

Wrong.

What I started to realize as the call progressed, and questions were asked and answered, is that the client sees the platform in a totally different light than what I could ever imagine. Use cases I'd never thought of started coming out of the woodwork. The littlest features in our platform seemed like monumental benefits to the user, and Tyler was going about all of this like he'd heard it a million times before... because he had.  

This is his job and he's been doing it day in and day out. 

I gained a lot from my meeting with Tyler. Going forward I can use the knowledge taken from the call to make suggestions or tweaks to future feature requests.

But the important thing to take away from all of this is that I was simply sitting in on something that Tyler does every day.

At Uberflip, we encourage collaboration with a "no work from home" policy, team project days called “Flip the Switch”, and an open concept office. Even with all of this, it would be difficult to transfer all of Tyler's knowledge into my brain without disrupting both of our routines. But one day, for one hour, gave me invaluable insight into the mind of a client—and Tyler's too.

"Tyler" could represent any employee outside of your team who spends their day doing something completely different from you.

Whether you're a content marketer creating content to address customer pain points or a developer building the product behind the scenes, it's easy to get siloed in your own activities and forget the bigger picture. "Tylers" can make you aware of new ideas.

There's a "Tyler" in every department: Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, Design, Development, etc. Each "Tyler" has their own workflow, insight, and knowledge of a different aspect of the business.

Sit down with these "Tylers" and learn what they have to share because, although knowledge in one facet of a business is valuable, understanding end-to-end how a product is built, used, marketed, and sold is the equivalent of a Van Gogh: priceless.

Talk to the "Tyler" on your Sales team and start creating a content library for Sales enablement. We'll show you how to get started.