SQL Optimization Walkthrough
An empathy-driven engineering exercise that turned customer pain into product investment.
Engineers building database internals can easily lose sight of what the experience feels like from the other side. Query performance issues that seem straightforward from the code are often opaque and frustrating for the customers who encounter them. This project was designed to close that gap through direct exposure.
The exercise brought engineers through a real customer workflow: starting with an actual customer conversation about a performance problem, moving into a dogfooding session where they reproduced the issue themselves, then diagramming the query execution path to pinpoint bottlenecks. The session culminated in a live demo showing the full detection-to-resolution cycle from the customer's perspective.
The impact went beyond a single workshop. By giving engineers visceral context for the pain their customers experienced, the exercise drove meaningful investment in an area of the product that had previously been deprioritized. It demonstrated that empathy is not just a soft skill — it is a prioritization tool.