Water leaks reveal their urgency the moment the tap runs dry. The quiet panic that follows highlights how much we take running water for granted—until it's gone.
The plumber doesn’t rely solely on blueprints or secondhand reports. He visits the site. He listens. He walks the space, tests faucets, knocks on tiles, and opens panels. No high-tech tools—just attention, presence, and precision. And it works. Software engineering could use more of that.
The Leak in the Code
Software has its leaks: bugs, bottlenecks, churn, abandonment. Something escapes. Value seeps out—users confused, stuck, frustrated, or gone. Often, leaks go undetected for months. Or worse, misdiagnosed. Symptoms get patched while root causes remain buried.
Most teams instinctively look inward: more dashboards, more logs, more tests. But the plumber’s move—going to the source—is often overlooked: go see the problem where it happens.
This isn't about returning to the office. That’s not the relevant habitat. What matters is where the product lives—on users' phones, in their browsers, while they’re buying tickets, filing invoices, or resetting passwords with a poor signal in a parking lot.
Mind-Reading by Proximity
Understanding users doesn’t happen through backlogs. The best insights come from sitting beside someone using the product. Watching a mouse hover uncertainly. Hearing a sigh at an unexpected error. Noticing a user opening another tab to search for how to complete a task that seemed intuitive.
Engineers especially benefit from this. Experiencing user confusion firsthand shifts how code is written. Clarity replaces cleverness. “Just one more step” becomes a bug, not a feature. Leaks become audible.
The Proxy for Telepathy
Mind reading doesn’t come from telemetry—it comes from proximity. Just like plumbing, the real issue might be two walls away from where the symptoms appear. The only way to find the leak is to be there.
Products fail not from lack of skill, but from lack of visibility. The fix isn’t more specs or larger teams—it’s time spent in the right place. This doesn’t need to happen daily. But if it never happens, the work happens in the dark. And something is almost certainly leaking.