I remember the time we urgently had to develop an application for our Client. We had to work overtime to make the Deadline. After 3 years we had to Upgrade the Server an found a Bug that crashed the whole application. But apparently in 3 years nobody even looked at it.
When users never use the features they asked for
211–220 of 228 posts
Re: When users never use the features they asked for
#212I remember a conversation with an inexperienced PM, who was still in the mode "we need to add X because a customer asked for it". What I've learned - although I've never had a PM role - is not to blindly just give customers what they ask for, but to figure out what they really need. Their feature requests are often a proxy for something else they aren't able to articulate. Another thing to be careful about is adding…
Exactly these 2 points. I as a PM for a platform may sound arrogant, however I strictly adhere to the phrase: Only what customerS need, not what they want. I also rely on numbers and classification: does this feature help one or more user? Which type? Power User(s)? Everyday normal users? Is this just emotional, a want or need? How much does a user benefit from the change? Can we do better, are we missing something (…
> Data itself (usage tracking) is highly misleading.
This is so true. Why is a feature unused? It could be:
* It is not needed
* Nobody can find it
* Nobody understands what it does or how it works
* The name is misleading people into thinking it's not what they want
* You left the feature flag off, the feature isn't even live
* It doesn't actually work
* It works sometimes, but frustrates users when it breaks so they don't come back
* Your data is wrong, and they do use it
* etc.
Lots of folks stop thinking at the first one.
Re: When users never use the features they asked for
#213People will buy products because if features they will never use. Not building costs money.
Case in point: 90% of the pickup trucks sold in the USA.
Or cars in general. So many huge SUVs with three rows of seating being driven by a single person. In other countries people would just use a moped.
Re: When users never use the features they asked for
#214I once had to develop a full application with really hard problem solving in a really complex domain that I had hard time to understand. This was for a big national phone operator. We delivered it under a lot of pressure from the sales team (I was in a shitty company, with few employees) and the contract was in multiple millions euros. That was literally one of our 2 or 3 customer. We delivered. One day we eventually…
>The company owner « joking » about how our sales team used alcohol, parties and embarrassing photos to make their customer buy our software.
That was an episode in House of Lies where the consultants sell their idea only through blackmail.
Re: When users never use the features they asked for
#215I once spent 6+ month working on a feature that was to be one of the flagship features of our next major release. We'd talked to several major customers about it and gotten lots of positive feedback. Once released, virtually no one used it and no one cared. On the flip side the by far most impactful feature I've ever added to any software in any point in my career came a couple of years later when working at the same…
I find this fascinating. Could you lay out what that feature did, generally?
Re: When users never use the features they asked for
#216I once had to develop a full application with really hard problem solving in a really complex domain that I had hard time to understand. This was for a big national phone operator. We delivered it under a lot of pressure from the sales team (I was in a shitty company, with few employees) and the contract was in multiple millions euros. That was literally one of our 2 or 3 customer. We delivered. One day we eventually…
That's a crazy story. My guess would have been, not that the product never worked, but that the delivered version was hacked together in the last 24 hours before delivery and never made it into source control. You know the technical details - do you think something like that could have happened, or really no one tried to use the product even once?
No, I don’t think it was changed. I just think that the people who bought the tool weren’t the engineers who needed it and that for some reason the engineers never ended using it, maybe because they didn’t even knew about the existence of the tool or because they felt it was useless to them. I don’t even remember them to be involved in the project, but once again, shitty company, I had no direct contacts with the end users. Everything was proxied with their buyings dept, our sales dept, and our product « managers » (who really liked their job of not being anything more than well paid proxies between sales and programmers). With this setup, I’m pretty sure our product, as complex as it was, was probably useless to them.
But meh, I left this company and I now work at a nicer company where I’m truly motivated knowing our end users enjoy using our products.
Re: When users never use the features they asked for
#217A fine post and I'm sure a fine tool, but why is an internal linter tool the subject of a proper academic paper? I can't imagine writing an academic paper for any of the projects of similar complexity and general interest that I've worked on.
You should consider it then! Having concrete data about anything in a peer reviewed form is always valuable.
It seems like a waste of time, when a just blog post could be 95% as helpful and be way faster and easier to publish.
You don't need peer review for everything.
Re: When users never use the features they asked for
#218I remember a conversation with an inexperienced PM, who was still in the mode "we need to add X because a customer asked for it". What I've learned - although I've never had a PM role - is not to blindly just give customers what they ask for, but to figure out what they really need. Their feature requests are often a proxy for something else they aren't able to articulate. Another thing to be careful about is adding…
Exactly these 2 points. I as a PM for a platform may sound arrogant, however I strictly adhere to the phrase: Only what customerS need, not what they want. I also rely on numbers and classification: does this feature help one or more user? Which type? Power User(s)? Everyday normal users? Is this just emotional, a want or need? How much does a user benefit from the change? Can we do better, are we missing something (…
I absolutely hate modern design that tries to get rid of all the "distractions". I have had a bunch of my favorite applications get MUCH worse due to hiding or elimination of key features in the name of making a simple slick design.
Re: When users never use the features they asked for
#219One of many things I learned from writing software just for myself is that I'm just about as bad as anybody at figuring out what I really want, even when I'm talking to myself. I've even had one or two cases where I ignored a feature I asked myself for, and much later realized: Hey, I could actually use that. The worst is asking myself, "How many times do I have to ask for this before you quit procrastinating and jus…
Oh hey its me. I've done some painstaking work to add a feature (hell, even just an excel macro that at the time seemed useful) and realize like 9 months later I've used the feature a whopping 3 times.
Try to enjoy the journey, not just the destination.
Re: When users never use the features they asked for
#220... and this is how we got WebUSB.
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