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

Users only care about 20% of your application

idiallo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 199 posts

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#151

Post by SoftTalker »

lomase wrote: post #142
sharkjacobs wrote: post #138

I made a little hobbyist app for myself, and I think it's pretty nice and occasionally think about polishing it up and releasing it. And the first reason I don't is because I'm not interested in promoting it, and it's pretty pointless to release to no one. But the much bigger reason is because I'm not interested in implementing the remaining 80% that I don't use myself.

I made one plugin for myself and released open source in github. The amount of, sometimes hostile, request I had to implement stuff I did not care made me stop the development.

Just tell them you'll be happy to consider including their patch to provide the missing features, or f-off. I've used a lot of open-source code which up-front says that issues requesting new features will be closed.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#153

Post by SoftTalker »

lawn wrote: post #45
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'd say Emacs and Neovim fit the mold even better than VS code. By themselves they're quite bare but with plugins, addons, and your own configuration they can become anything you want (and more!).

I suppose the core of emacs is pretty minimal but in practice the number of packages that it includes by default is pretty large.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#154

Post by g8oz »

pixl97 wrote: post #124
rubicon33 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Polish increases customer lifetime value.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#155

Post by komadori »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #121
rightbyte wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked for a company which adopted FogBugz. The multiplier it calculated to be applied to developer time estimates quickly diverge towards positive infinity. It's probably fair to share some of the blame for that between us and it. Nonetheless, we managed to hit our quarterly release deadline well in advance of the predicted five to six years :-P.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#156

Post by Cockbrand »

reinvent42 wrote: post #85

> I often destroyed our home computer when I was a kid. Armed with only 2GB of storage, I'd constantly hunt for files to delete to save space. Many people have a similar experience, but it's amusing that statements like this can roughly indicate your age and the systems you were dealing with... Mine is 40 MB.

Oh yes, the memories! [Pun not intended] Mine is 880k. Boy, did I squeeze the last bytes out of that Workbench boot floppy!

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#157

Post by hermitcrab »

>You can't predict exactly which 20% each user will need, but you can build systems that let them find and enhance their own slice.

If your users are programmers, engineers or scientists, fine.

If your users are not the above, fuhgeddaboudit. You will end up in support hell.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#158

Post by ozim »

hansvm wrote: post #101

At one SaaS I worked at, I spent a day or two on a foolhardy initiative to analyze our users based on the subset of features they actively used (hoping to reign in the complexity of the product to a few core archetypes we could design for, ideally eliminating some of the more annoying features on the way). The results weren't any better than a weighted random choice. Beyond the login page (and even that had a few cus…

That’s why pushing back on features is important. It is super hard to remove them once they are in.

Most of the time it goes way that sales people promise something you build it „because that’s going to be great huge customer” - but after a year or 2 years that huge company moves away because people who originally wanted features moved to other jobs or departments and you are left supporting something some other customer started using by coincidence and is using it in totally wrong way but it somehow works good enough but still initial effort is not paid back and best would be to kill the feature.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#159

Post by tuna74 »

throwmeaway222 wrote: post #132

20%? I imagine most of us use 0.1% of Jira. And it's the same 0.1% for all users in the org. The app is massive, millions of lines of code and we're effectively using like 60 SQL statements that run within it. create issue, edit issue, move issue, update issue status, close sprint, repeat

Why don't you use something cheaper then?

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#160

Post by FireBeyond »

rubicon33 wrote: post #116
polishdude20 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a place that did it a third way: The CEO had a product vision that changed every month.

Ultimately the vision for the company and the product have to come from SOMEWHERE. Small companies often have the CEO in a product position in my experience. Still isn’t ideal though and more to your point, how they actually do the product role is really what matters. I.e. chasing shiny objects.

Depending on the company's product (and this is a wide range), somewhere between employee 10 and employee 100, the founder needs to decide "Am I CEO of the company? Or CEO of the product?" (As in, that "and" needs to become an "or").
Post reply on HN