How to develop product acumen as a software engineer?
I am working with a set of very amazing Frontend engineers. They are able to come up with very important and to the point product level suggestions and questions regarding UI/UX. They participate heavily in user research. All of this in addition to writing good quality code. How do I develop this product acumen?
Start noticing things you like about the products you use and also notice what you dislike. Follow some UX influencer or a documentary called abstract by Netflix. Learn what fonts work, hierarchy of content.
Simulate how somebody would use the product in your mind and always think that the user is dumb. If something doesn't stand out as obvious it probably needs more fine-tuning. Make sure your tool can be used by a fool.
This will hopefully make your intuition about something stronger and during this you can pickup any course on analytics and relate the metrics to a real world scenario.
Learn from them? Ask them to take you under their wings ? Ask better questions ?