Recently was my company’s 4th birthday as a released product, and yesterday the team did some fun stuff! Asides from the amazing lunch at local restaurant, I must praise my CEO and CTO on doing what I've always believed to be one of the best leadership exercises: they took the whole team (including devs) to meet a customer in person. We learned about many role types who use our software, and their gripes with it and how far into the adoption they were.

And the best thing of course happened: We developed a lot more empathy. We quickly started writing code in our heads to fix their problems, and we had notes for Monday for things to research.

Developers often lose sight of the customer, and it's understandable but not excusable. This very much helped with that. I would 100% recommend a similar exercise at your place of work.

If you've read the amazing Give and Take by @AdamMGrant, you'll know that when you show your employees the results of their work, motivation is increased. Many studies confirm this empirically. So yeah, fun, motivating day. Thanks boss!