Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

iism.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 428 posts

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#181

Post by malux85 »

SwiftyBug wrote: post #169
malux85 wrote: post #159

Yes, so I put analytics in to prove it. I told the project leader that nobody wants a share button there, because of the nature of the data, nobody will share it. They disagreed strongly, suddenly the share button was super important. So I put tracking on it. A year after launch, guess what? Yep that’s right, nobody clicked the button. Not a single user. So I showed them the data and told them I was right. I told the…

That was porn, wasn't it?

Hahahaha I re-read my paragraph and it does sound a bit like that!

I wish it was - then there might have been some engineering challenges related to scale, but sadly no, it was a mobile web app for getting small % discounts at stalls at a niche event.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#182

Post by artsyca »

MattGaiser wrote: post #9
mathewsanders wrote: post #5

“Agile teams that truly iterate with the customer can often avoid these problems because the customer is there the whole way through and the team continuously pivots to close gaps discovered by the customer throughout the project, thereby building something the customer actually needs and wants.” I‘m 2 years into my first role as a product owner (made the switch from design) and working at a fortune 100. The thing th…

Customers can be a nightmare simply because they don't want to be closely involved and on their end, they usually are not engineers so the requirements can easily not make sense. I don't blame people for avoiding such tasks, especially in a Fortune 100. The bigger the company, the more diffuse responsibility and the harder it is to steer the ship anyway.

This is often because people don't understand that the real deliverable is knowledge gained throughout the process and the software is actually an artefact of this knowledge.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#183

Post by fxtentacle »

malux85 wrote: post #167
petters wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you all knew about optimizations 10x a data scientist salary, but didn't act on them? Actually good that the company hired him then.

Yeah I thought this exactly. If he had any brains he’d negotiate with management a 5x bonus for solving it, tied to achieving the 10x optimisations I did this several times in my early career and was paid a lot and it was win/win You have to phrase it carefully, but if you phrase it as a win/win with no risk, they’ll sign off on it

I had a similar situation, but it didn't go through. I offered to reduce the company-wide monthly costs by 5% in exchange for 40k once by replacing an outside vendor with my own self-developed clone which the company would then own. Didn't go through because our investors feared an increased dependency on me as an employee.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#184

Post by Kunigaikstis »

For a couple of years now, I've been developing features for a product that hasn't found product-market fit. Features that nobody _really_ gives a shit about. I can talk directly to one of the cofounders, bring them evidence based on analytics or the past failings of the giants upon whose shoulders we're standing on. His response is, majority of the time, "yeah, I get that. We promised this to a few customers and I really think it'll work". It hasn't worked.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#185

Post by naniwaduni »

buu700 wrote: post #146
noizejoy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story would probably make little sense to most HN readers, since it's very old and what was very non-obvious back then, became very obvious 5 years later. Around 1994/95 client/server was unassailable in board rooms (much like AI is now). And after initially speaking up against it, I ended up shutting up about my criticism of that architectural approach, since it would have just gotten me fired. So I ended up sne…

This may be a stupid question, but what does "client/server" mean in this context? I would interpret it to mean any networked or Internet-based application that has both client- and server-side logic, which obviously isn't anything special in 2020, but it sounds like you're referring to something else that would now be considered outdated?

I might be totally off the mark here, but in context I assumed the contrast was with doing all work on a thick "client". A client-server architecture in principle lets you run thinner clients and offload the heavy work, but in practice the network would've been expensive.

A modern analogue might be something like premature distributed computing.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#186

Post by DonHopkins »

malux85 wrote: post #159

Yes, so I put analytics in to prove it. I told the project leader that nobody wants a share button there, because of the nature of the data, nobody will share it. They disagreed strongly, suddenly the share button was super important. So I put tracking on it. A year after launch, guess what? Yep that’s right, nobody clicked the button. Not a single user. So I showed them the data and told them I was right. I told the…

Were you working for Cirrus Cybernetics Corporation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYsng5_5h3g

Share and Enjoy!

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#188

Post by dkersten »

worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

In my own experience, often non-technical people will attribute things as AI that we wouldn’t, eg any basic automation. Really anything that’s in any way intelligent or seems that way. I had a project where people were excited about a feature that was basically just alerting when one value crossed over or under another... I wonder if your team could provide real value to customers providing some smart “AI” feature that isn’t actually machine learning.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#189

Post by FreeRadical »

Kunigaikstis wrote: post #184

For a couple of years now, I've been developing features for a product that hasn't found product-market fit. Features that nobody _really_ gives a shit about. I can talk directly to one of the cofounders, bring them evidence based on analytics or the past failings of the giants upon whose shoulders we're standing on. His response is, majority of the time, "yeah, I get that. We promised this to a few customers and I r…

You need to ask him to define success and failure for the feature. Under what conditions will he accept it has not worked

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#190

Post by jaekash »

franze wrote: post #162

I am working with Start-ups since 2008 - and classic companies before that. My chances to know beforehand what customers want is 50/50.* So I am very humble by now. Launch super early. Get Feedback. Quantity wise and quality feedback (listen closely if you made their life any better). Iterrate and/or change path. Yes, like flipping a coin. Sad that, quite a lot of managers have a way lower hit rate as they have an in…

> My chances to know beforehand what customers want is 50/50.*

It probably is not 50/50 for literally any idea, it is maybe 50/50 for well considered ideas, but even then I doubt it. I am pretty sure there are things which you clearly know will not go down well with your customers, or that your customers won't care for.

Post reply on HN