Will's path runs from designing bucket trucks to self-taught software engineering, education products, and database tooling, and that background gives this episode a distinctive lens: software is still a product people use with bodies, habits, emotions, and mental models. The conversation makes product sense concrete through examples like onboarding timing, course complexity, support workflows, and the small confidence signals that separate stable-feeling products from merely functional ones.

You'll hear why watching users work keeps surfacing across this series, how to tell broken experiences from merely unpopular ones, why user feedback usually improves polish more than strategy, and how product engineers can stay valuable in an agent-heavy future by understanding both the user and the constraints of the software medium.

• Use AI agents more for gathering than executing: explore multiple solution paths, adjacent domains, and missing context before you ship.
• Give agents richer context like user demographics, constraints, and likely mental models, then use your own judgment to evaluate what comes back.
• Slow down long enough to question assumptions before implementation; use AI as a creativity and critique tool, not just a code accelerator.

• Will King - site
• Deploy Empathy (Michele Hansen)
• The Mom Test (Rob Fitzpatrick)
• Interface Craft (Josh Puckett)

• Company: Crunchy Data
• GitHub: @wking-io
• 𝕏: @wking__

• Website: kentcdodds.com
• 𝕏: @kentcdodds
• GitHub: @kentcdodds
• Youtube: Kent C. Dodds

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Aaron builds in public—Laravel roots, education, and now Solo, a terminal multiplexer–style desktop app for organizing agents and dev stacks. This episode is a practical tour of product sense for developers: watching people work, reading support email with empathy, cow paths vs. fences, and why the “right” architecture can still lose if humans go home furious.

You’ll hear how Aaron reasons from problem → solution when users ask for worktrees, when to duplicate UI affordances even when the model is “one,” and how introverts can still do discovery by treating outreach like an optimization mission—plus niche opportunities outside the Cursor clone gold rush.

• When someone asks for a solution (e.g. a feature), slow down and ask what problem they’re really trying to solve—users often lead with implementations.
• Practice user empathy: imagine someone stressed, trying to finish work; question “technically correct” UX that blames the user instead of protecting them (confirmations, back-button data loss, etc.).
• If talking to people is hard, reframe discovery as a systematic search (spreadsheet energy, trusted partners, or domain friends)—or pair with someone who loves conversations.

• Aaron D. Francis — X
• Jobs to Be Done (Clay Christensen)
• The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman)

• Company: Solo & Laravel education
• GitHub: @aarondfrancis
• 𝕏: @aarondfrancis

• Website: kentcdodds.com
• 𝕏: @kentcdodds
• GitHub: @kentcdodds
• Youtube: Kent C. Dodds

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Dillon's path runs from internal insurance tools to Vercel Domains to Cloudflare's agent and dashboard work-always with the same through-line: care about the user, get real feedback, and invest in primitives so delighters don't collapse under bad foundations. This episode covers metrics and paging as a product habit, learning from customer escalations, scoping small when AI speeds up coding, and building cross-functional relationships (support, sales, finance) as part of engineering judgment.

You'll hear practical parallels with episodes on delighters and onboarding tension, plus why reviewing agent-written code still matters for system intuition when things break at 2 a.m.

• Try hard and care a lot; more practically, focus on foundations and primitives.
• Put good feedback systems in place so you know what's going on with your product and where it doesn't feel good-alerting and metrics, customer journey signals, or customer interviews.
• If you have a customer support team, sit with them and watch them triage cases for your product; get to know support-they're sitting on a gold mine of product signal-and empathize with them like you do with users.
• Kent's shorthand for the mindset Dillon agreed with: make pain painful-if your users are hurting, you should feel it too.

• Cloudflare - Developers
• Cloudflare Agents
• Dillon Mulroy - site
• Dillon Mulroy - GitHub

• Company: Cloudflare
• GitHub: @dmmulroy
• X: @dillon_mulroy

• Website: kentcdodds.com
• X: @kentcdodds
• GitHub: @kentcdodds
• Youtube: Kent C. Dodds

Watch this episode on YouTube