Sara Hix
VP Product, Innovation & Engineering
Birmingham, Alabama, United States
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Sara Hix is the VP of Product Innovation & Engineering at Watershed Health, where she leads cross-functional teams building technology to improve care coordination and data exchange across the healthcare system. She has spent her career at the intersection of product, engineering, and user experience, translating complex problems into practical, scalable solutions.
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The Empathy Gap Between Product and Engineering Teams
We spend a lot of time talking about empathy for our users, but some of the most important empathy I’ve seen in software happens between the people building the product.
I’ve spent my career working between Product and Engineering, and today I lead teams across both. Some of the strongest development teams I’ve built aren’t great simply because they have talented engineers, they’re great because those engineers have strong, trusting relationships with Product. They ask questions, challenge assumptions, understand the problem behind the ticket, and know that disagreement doesn’t have to mean dysfunction.
That didn’t happen by accident.
In this session, I’ll share lessons from building those teams and what I’ve learned about closing the empathy gap between Product and Engineering. We’ll look at the relationship from the developer’s side of the table: what Product may be dealing with that Engineering never sees, why developers are often brought in after a problem has already been turned into a solution, and what engineers can do to change that dynamic without becoming Product Managers.
We’ll talk about how to uncover the problem behind a requirement, ask better questions, communicate technical tradeoffs in a way the business understands, and push back without becoming a blocker. Along the way, we’ll talk about what building an elevator where you really needed a ramp can teach us about how Product and Engineering solve problems together.
Because the best developers I’ve worked with don’t just build what’s in the ticket. They understand enough about the problem and trust Product enough to help us build the right thing.
Nobody Taught You How to Work With Humans
We spend years teaching engineers how to work with computers. How to debug them, structure them, make them faster, and keep them from doing wildly unexpected things.
Then one day, the job quietly changes.
Suddenly, your biggest dependency is people.
And people have terrible documentation.
There’s no API. The error messages are vague. Production behavior is wildly inconsistent. And somehow, nobody thought this deserved a course.
As engineers become more senior, technical ability is still essential and being right isn’t enough anymore. Your impact increasingly depends on your ability to explain a technical problem to someone who isn’t technical, push back without becoming “the engineer who always says no,” disagree productively, communicate tradeoffs, influence decisions you don’t own, and figure out what someone is actually asking for.
In this session, we’ll explore the human skills that turn technical expertise into influence. We’ll look at how to translate, not dumb down, technical concepts for different audiences, how to challenge an idea while staying part of the solution, why curiosity is an underrated technical skill, and what happens when your impact starts being measured less by what you personally build and more by what you enable.
Because eventually, the hardest systems you’ll work on aren’t written in Python, C#, JavaScript, or PHP.
They’re made of people.
The Empathy Gap in Product Teams
In product management, empathy is usually framed as understanding the user. We run interviews, map journeys, and obsess over customer pain points. But great products aren’t built by user empathy alone.
They’re built by teams that understand each other.
In reality, product leaders sit in the middle of competing pressures: customers asking for solutions, engineers navigating technical complexity, and businesses pushing for speed and growth. When empathy only flows toward the user, teams often end up frustrated, misaligned, and building features that look good in theory but fail in practice.
This talk explores why empathy is one of the most powerful, and misunderstood, tools in product leadership. Drawing on lessons from building software in the complex world of healthcare technology, she’ll show how empathy for users, engineers, stakeholders and systems transforms how teams make decisions and build products.
Because the most successful product teams don’t just understand their users. They understand each other.
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