Strong leadership cares about cultivating success and having a team that delivers successful projects, which means honing your understanding of what is important to your customer. Whether you’re writing code for an external customer, developing tools for other engineers, or even running a support team, you have some group that depends on the output of your work. Treat them as your customers. Taking the time to develop customer empathy is important because you’ll need to give your engineers context for their work. Developing customer empathy will also help you figure out which areas of the technology have the greatest direct impact on your customers, and that understanding will guide where you invest engineering effort.