171–180 of 221 posts
> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product. I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/ac…
> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product. I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/ac…
> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product. I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/ac…
> The rewrite took 2 weeks. We removed 60% of features. Added a simple progress bar. Built Slack integration for questions. Created "done-for-you" workflows. > Our support tickets dropped 70%. If this isn't fake something is extremely wrong with this picture.
Reddit has become an outlet for creative writing. This might have been inspired by some real life events, or it might have been pure fiction. Either way the end result is dripping with the typical Reddit creative writing elements, with a dash of LinkedIn style business storytelling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of product managers have never studied product development. You'll find philosophers, designers, physicists, even musicians in the role. Many have great people skills, but little understanding of customer service, building products, or scaling a business. And funnily enough, those are all real careers and degrees. The result, which you often see in companies with 300+ employees, is that engineers have far more e…
> Last year I dug into this and found it's not unusual. Many software companies hire smart people as CPO, Product Director, or Head of Product because they have leadership skills, people skills, and some knowledge of the industry. But most have little to no background in business, marketing, economics, or product development. Some companies go even further and promote an engineer with project management experience to…
"Many software companies hire smart people as CPO, Product Director, or Head of Product because they have leadership skills, people skills, and some knowledge of the industry. Some companies go even further and promote an engineer with project management experience to Head of Product. But most have little to no background in business, marketing, economics, or product development."
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100% agree with this take. I work in observability space. We use our own product to monitor our services, and being a daily user of the product helps us make it better. Our customers also agree. We get opportunity to talk to our customers doing product demos at conferences, etc, and all the feedback I have gotten is that they love the product! But wish it was cheaper.
How to say datadog with more words.
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I run a small tech startup, about 2M ARR. And at times we’ve been short staffed on support and I’ve sat in for support for a day or two. And every time I do this I discover loads of issues customers are complaining about that don’t seem to ever make it back to our engineering team. Perhaps it’s just our support reps, or the nature of support, but they seem to love to “solve” problems themselves rather than reporting…
Always fun to see an exchange on Reddit like: Person1: "thing doesn't work?" Person2: "yeah it doesn't work for me either" Person3: "it's always something I have to work around" Person4: "I work for as a customer support outreach social media community engagement executive. Can you go and jump through hoops and open a support case?" Not raising it internally, not getting anything changed or fixed; suggesting the cust…
I haven’t used the products of any company I’ve worked for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of product managers have never studied product development. You'll find philosophers, designers, physicists, even musicians in the role. Many have great people skills, but little understanding of customer service, building products, or scaling a business. And funnily enough, those are all real careers and degrees. The result, which you often see in companies with 300+ employees, is that engineers have far more e…
> Last year I dug into this and found it's not unusual. Many software companies hire smart people as CPO, Product Director, or Head of Product because they have leadership skills, people skills, and some knowledge of the industry. But most have little to no background in business, marketing, economics, or product development. Some companies go even further and promote an engineer with project management experience to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
God forbid an engineer should have an opinion on UI/UX.
I have long believed that the biggest issue here is that engineers and power users generally have a much higher “pain threshold” when it comes to poor or complex UI/UX. They are not always the best people to judge how or if less experienced users will tolerate or adapt to those patterns. It’s fine to have opinions but they must be prepared for them to be challenged. Even better if they can invite others to challenge…
1) Exactly what you wrote: power users don’t even realize they clicked through five things in ten seconds any one of which would have derailed a weaker user, because they’re so used to bad UI that it’s almost invisible to them.
2) Zero care given to what’s most natural for the platform, for cost of development & maintenance, or what’s easiest for the user, when (bad) designers and (bad) “product folks” get involved and are way too into the wrong kinds of “consistency”, especially brand and cross-platform consistency (yo, I’m not sure it’s worth spending extra money fucking up contrast and platform norms on your inputs so your fucking radio buttons are “on brand” or whatever, like, I’m deeply skeptical of the actual business value of that kind of thing, though I can see the PowerPoint presentation value… and that’s why it happens)