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Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

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Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#11

Post by parpfish »

bdw5204 wrote: post #8
kmoser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article states that the biggest factor was user misunderstanding of the options, not so much the number of different options. In other words, if they offer option A at $x and option B at 10*$x, if most users mistakenly think they need option B, the calculator is misleading. Also, I'm a big fan of "contact us for pricing." It's annoying for users who are window-shopping and want a quickie ballpark, but it helps yo…

Many users will see "contact us for pricing" and assume that means you can't afford it. That's fine if your customers are enterprises but definitely not for consumer products that middle class people might actually buy.

or the product is still being built out and they don’t know how to price something in beta

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#12

Post by makeitdouble »

The general message is interesting.

This specific bit kinda gives pause though:

> One slight misinterpretation and wrong input and you'd get an estimate that's overstated by as much as 1,000x.

Does it also mean that in real world usage, one slight misinterpretation or misevaluation of your metrics and you're liable to 1000x more than you planned to ?

I totally see this as a reality of online billing systems. I've misconfigured GCP prototypes and ended with 100+ bills where I though it would be 2 or 3 at most and didn't care to watch for a few days.

But I'd understand a client bailing out when they realize slight changes to the sliders result in wild increases in the planned pricing. And removing the tool would sure help for registration, but not help the customer if they hit these kind of issues down the line.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#13

Post by sabbaticaldev »

kmoser wrote: post #7
jclulow wrote: post #2

Perhaps removing a pricing scheme so complicated that it literally can't be modelled usefully by the customer would be even better?

The article states that the biggest factor was user misunderstanding of the options, not so much the number of different options. In other words, if they offer option A at $x and option B at 10*$x, if most users mistakenly think they need option B, the calculator is misleading. Also, I'm a big fan of "contact us for pricing." It's annoying for users who are window-shopping and want a quickie ballpark, but it helps yo…

the article stating doesn’t mean it’s correct. The users misunderstood because they have a poor pricing model which obviously users won’t understand because pinecone isn’t as known as mysql or postgres yet

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#14

Post by makeitdouble »

kmoser wrote: post #7
jclulow wrote: post #2

Perhaps removing a pricing scheme so complicated that it literally can't be modelled usefully by the customer would be even better?

The article states that the biggest factor was user misunderstanding of the options, not so much the number of different options. In other words, if they offer option A at $x and option B at 10*$x, if most users mistakenly think they need option B, the calculator is misleading. Also, I'm a big fan of "contact us for pricing." It's annoying for users who are window-shopping and want a quickie ballpark, but it helps yo…

> "contact us for pricing."

My biggest issue with these: when introducing a new tool/solution, we often don't know how much we want to use it. In particular, it will usually be introduced in a minor application first, and if it feels reliable and useful it moves to bigger systems and more critical roles.

Contact for pricing requires us to explain all our internal politics, budget management, which systems we have etc. upfront to random strangers, who are also incentivized to just onboard us first and push the sunk cost fallacy button from there.

I kinda feel this works best for companies that don't really care about comparing products and will buy whatever give them the best numbers on the contract (which is common for enterprise software, it's just not my personal cup of tea as a small fish in the game)

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#15

Post by gk1 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #12

The general message is interesting. This specific bit kinda gives pause though: > One slight misinterpretation and wrong input and you'd get an estimate that's overstated by as much as 1,000x. Does it also mean that in real world usage, one slight misinterpretation or misevaluation of your metrics and you're liable to 1000x more than you planned to ? I totally see this as a reality of online billing systems. I've mis…

(Author here)

> Does it also mean that in real world usage, one slight misinterpretation or misevaluation of your metrics and you're liable to 1000x more than you planned to?

Unlikely. You can see why in these two examples that really happened:

One user I spoke with said they assumed "queries per second" is calculated by (number of searches) x (top-k for each search), where "top-k" is the number of results they want back. I don't remember their top-k but let's say it's 10 -- so they were entering a value for "queries per second" that was 10x higher than it should be and they'd see an estimate around 10x higher than they'd really be charged.

Another user thought you get "number of vectors" by multiplying the number of embeddings by the embedding dimensionality (1,536 is a common one). So they were entering a value literally 1,536x higher than they should've. Their actual usage would be calculated (by Pinecone) correctly and not be that high.

Vector dimensionality is a basic concept for AI engineers and QPS is a basic metric for DB admins, but Pinecone sees lots of users who are either new to AI or new to managing DBs or both.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#16

Post by ibash »

> Before long, a dedicated Slack channel was created, which accrued over 550+ messages representing opinions from every corner of the company. Another few thousand words and dozens of hours were spent in meetings discussing what we should add to the calculator to fix it.

This is a symptom of over hiring. Too many people removes agency.

When people lose sight of what's actually important and feel that they must reach consensus by committee then there are too many people.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#17

Post by roenxi »

> In an internal poll, 7 of every 10 people in the company thought the version with the calculator would do better.

An interesting and pretty classic dynamic - I liked the article overall but I think this point didn't get the highlighting it deserved. If 30% of the people involved think that the calculator is a bad idea that signals a potentially huge problem even if the majority think it is fine.

Be alert to the politics here. Although it seems otherwise, people generally don't like to criticise other teams in the business unless there is a political gain to be had. By extension, if I polled the company and asked "is this thing my team did a net positive?" I'd expect the default position to be "yes" as people wouldn't want to stir the pot for no reason. 30% of people signalling that it might be value-destructive is much more significant than it seems because of that. It should trigger some fairly thoughtful consideration of why exactly they thought that.

In this case they seem to have indeed been alert to all that and the story has a happy ending, which is nice. But this poll result was always evidence of a serious problem.

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#18

Post by dhosek »

bdw5204 wrote: post #8
kmoser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article states that the biggest factor was user misunderstanding of the options, not so much the number of different options. In other words, if they offer option A at $x and option B at 10*$x, if most users mistakenly think they need option B, the calculator is misleading. Also, I'm a big fan of "contact us for pricing." It's annoying for users who are window-shopping and want a quickie ballpark, but it helps yo…

Many users will see "contact us for pricing" and assume that means you can't afford it. That's fine if your customers are enterprises but definitely not for consumer products that middle class people might actually buy.

A lot of time when there’s something like that, I’m fine not having a firm number, but it’s nice to have at least a ballpark idea of cost. (I found this particularly egregious with musical instrument pricing where I didn’t know if I was looking at a $1000 instrument or a $20,000 instrument, so I generally assumed that these would be cases where I clearly couldn’t afford it so best not to wonder—not to mention the cases where the list price was often as much as double the actual street price for an instrument).

Re: Removing stuff is never obvious yet often better

#20

Post by Cerium »

ramshanker wrote: post #9
kmoser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article states that the biggest factor was user misunderstanding of the options, not so much the number of different options. In other words, if they offer option A at $x and option B at 10*$x, if most users mistakenly think they need option B, the calculator is misleading. Also, I'm a big fan of "contact us for pricing." It's annoying for users who are window-shopping and want a quickie ballpark, but it helps yo…

>>> I'm a big fan of "contact us for pricing." I have opposite feeling about them. They are like open invitation to give the sales guy a window of opportunity to look up your company website, and markup the price accordingly.

Yep, I will exhaust every option with transparent pricing before even calling the best looking option with "contact us for pricing".
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