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Users only care about 20% of your application

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Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#121

Post by michaelrpeskin »

rightbyte wrote: post #84
raincole wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy how well Joel Spolsky's works aged. Some of them ended up proving wrong (like he once predicted that making graphic cards would be a very thin margin business[0]), but most are still true today. Probably truer than when they were written. [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v In his defense, by the time 'video chips' were totally different things from today's mighty 5080.

He also pioneered 'velocity tracking' for SWE tasks. Seems like a major disservice in hind sight. But then again I don't think I can't blame him for Agile and Jira.

But I think he's the only one to have done it right. I've never seen velocity tracking correct for measured inaccuracy in each developer's estimates. I've tried so many times to implement his EBS approach, but no one wants to do it.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#122

Post by stronglikedan »

tnolet wrote: post #68

Very true. But then you start selling to Enterprise and everything changes. Because one missing "hygiene feature"* can tank the the whole deal. And every Enterprise has a different one. *like a toilet. It needs to be there. You use it 3 minutes per day. If it is not there, the house is uninhabitable.

> like a toilet... You use it 3 minutes per day

I think you may need to go see a doctor about that, seriously.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#123

Post by pixl97 »

tnolet wrote: post #89
xnorswap wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best decision I ever made was moving from a company that acted on the whims of whomever the sales team spoke to last, to a company that had a strong product vision and was happy to say no to their customers on occasion. It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter. You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise yo…

Even if you weed out the willy nilly stuff, you will bump into Enterprise users that are actually correct. They will mention something you know you should have added but always wrote off as "bloat" or "not really really really needed". Those things start happening more and more the moment you are doing $100K plus deals.

>bump into Enterprise users

What a lot of these HN programmers seem to miss, is it's not about what you or your application provides. It's about what your competition is willing to provide. If you don't have much competition then that's great, but the moment your 100k-10m paying user starts testing the other software your C-levels and sales people are going to have the programmers locked out of the building the moment they say they won't write a feature.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#124

Post by pixl97 »

rubicon33 wrote: post #113
mackman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As best I can tell we've never sold the same product twice. Product roadmap is "whatever the last person I spoke to asked for." And tech debt maintaining a grab bag of 5,000 almost-but-not-quite-entirely-production-grade "must have" features that the customers rarely if ever use despite claiming that not having it was a deal breaker, is, well, debty.

Oh my god you just perfectly described the frustration of working in enterprise SaaS. It’s been fun in some ways but the constant churn of almost-but-not-entirely-production-grade software is soul crushing. We celebrate and reward speed to market and lack of process in a way that feels unhealthy and unrewarding. I’ve worked at consumer facing companies but also other enterprise SaaS and have to say I’ve never seen it…

Customers buy features, customers rarely buy polish.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#126

Post by ryandrake »

xnorswap wrote: post #83
mackman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As best I can tell we've never sold the same product twice. Product roadmap is "whatever the last person I spoke to asked for." And tech debt maintaining a grab bag of 5,000 almost-but-not-quite-entirely-production-grade "must have" features that the customers rarely if ever use despite claiming that not having it was a deal breaker, is, well, debty.

The best decision I ever made was moving from a company that acted on the whims of whomever the sales team spoke to last, to a company that had a strong product vision and was happy to say no to their customers on occasion. It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter. You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise yo…

This is one of the things I try to suss out when I interview somewhere. Do you have a product team (or at least someone in leadership) with a stable requirements vision, or do you just haphazardly develop based on whoever your sales team last talked to. Having a stable roadmap is an absolute requirement for me. I may not agree with the roadmap or priorities, but I'd rather have them than not have them.

I've worked in both types of companies, and the ones where sales dictated what we worked on this week were universally awful.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#127

Post by mushufasa »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #66

I kinda miss the unix philosophy... one tool for one job. A PDF reader should read PDFs, there's no need for it to have its own (possibly paid) cloud service and an AI chat bot. I do get why some integrations are beneficial (eg. office software with text editing, spreadsheets and a database, so you can generate eg. letters with data from a database, etc... but every service needing its own cloud and adding a useless…

the counterpoint is that unix itself is a holistic system -- the value of unix is the integration of a bunch of different tools by providing a consistent way to manipulate streams of text and files with standardization

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#128

Post by magicalhippo »

nradov wrote: post #100
xnorswap wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best decision I ever made was moving from a company that acted on the whims of whomever the sales team spoke to last, to a company that had a strong product vision and was happy to say no to their customers on occasion. It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter. You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise yo…

It really depends on the industry. In a narrow vertical market with only a limited number of large customers, the vendors pretty much have to roll over and do whatever the customers demand regardless of product vision. Give the customers what they want or else they'll find a more pliable competitor. The power dynamics are different in more horizontal markets.

If the customer has people on the other end that knows about their processes and cares, you can push back.

We landed our largest customer by gar a few years back, and we pushed back hard. However we had good arguments why, and explained why changing their workflow would be much better or offered some other approach to solve the problem that didn't involve a new bespoke and brittle feature.

On the other side were a team that knew the processes well and understood our arguments.

After they went live, the management thanked us for helping them improve their organization.

On the other hand there have been cases where decisions is made by leaders so high up they have no idea what's going on by those that need the tool, and aren't interested in spending time or effort on it. Not much you can do then.

edit: Though sometimes they learn. We've had a few customers who we said no to since their wishes were not really feasible, and who selected others and failed, and failed again, before finally ending up with us, on our terms.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#129

Post by hungryhobbit »

benrutter wrote: post #28

> Slack works similarly with its integrations. Discord does this with bots and servers. The platform provides the foundation, but users craft their own experience on top of it. Not really the articles core point, but to me at least, those two products are full of loads of stuff I don't want! I thought VS code was a good example, I'm curious about if anyone has other examples that they think do modularity well?

I thought VS Code was a terrible example: don't 100% of VS Code users use the code editing pane?

Some might use the debugger and some might use extensions and some might use AI and so on ... but there's nothing 80/20 (or 20/80) about the core of the product, and that seems to directly contradict the article's point.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#130

Post by indoordin0saur »

raincole wrote: post #50
CodesInChaos wrote: post #19

Pretty similar article to some old Spolsky blogposts: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/

It's crazy how well Joel Spolsky's works aged. Some of them ended up proving wrong (like he once predicted that making graphic cards would be a very thin margin business[0]), but most are still true today. Probably truer than when they were written. [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v In his defense, by the time 'video chips' were totally different things from today's mighty 5080.

Really? I think he seems entirely wrong when it comes to bloatware. For instance, whenever I open Adobe lightroom on my high-powered desktop PC it turns into a space heater and is crammed with junk features that I feel the need to turn off.
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