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I'll warn against getting way too focused on this as an early company. Getting something up and running is often waaaaaay more valuable then achieving Stripe l

by fny 6y ago

I'll warn against getting way too focused on this as an early company. Getting something up and running is often waaaaaay more valuable then achieving Stripe level UX from the outset, and then as time progresses you must make a conscious effort to improve. Remember, Stripe has been an app for about a decade. That's a decade's worth of learning what users care about and what details matter. And clearly that's a decade to polish a product to near perfection. A trap I've fallen in myself, and I see /a lot/ is that people focus on delighting their users before they even know what delights their users or what their users care about. Often you'll only learn that by having a product that works and customers need from the outset.

ss3000 6y ago
That's fair and valid, but shifting your culture from one that's laser-focused on shipping features that work to one that cares about shipping polished features that delights users definitely gets exponentially harder as your company scales in size. The sweet-spot for making that transition is essentially as soon as you've found product-market fit, no later and no sooner, and missing that sweet spot even a little bit can make the transition very difficult and very costly. But the dilemma is, as most successful founders will likely tell you, we're only good at identifying product-market fit in hindsight, long after it happens (and it may never actually happen). I've worked at plenty of companies that pay lip service to wanting to ship polished features that delight users while still overwhelmingly shipping features in a very utilitarian, timeline dominated fashion, long past the point where they've demonstrated product market fit. As with anything in product/engineering/design, it's all about tradeoffs and striking the right balance, and where the right balance stands will always keep shifting under your feet as you make progress...
- rlonn 6y ago
  There is one way to make sure the product improves after shipping a quick-and-dirty first version: dog-fooding. Be a user, for real. Many seem to think that just using the product equals dog-fooding, but real dog-fooding is when you can honestly say you get real value out of using the product. It is when you'd pay to use it. When you use your own product and gets value out of doing so, you have true customer perspective and your needs are aligned with your customers needs.
unityByFreedom 6y ago
> A trap I see /a lot/ is that people focus on delighting their users before they even know what delights their users or what their users care about. That's odd. The point of focusing on users is to discover what users want. If you're not doing then you're not really focused on users.
- shaan7 6y ago
  But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the actual "delighting" process. Also, +1 to the parent comment. I worked at a startup where we made exactly that mistake - we delayed releases until it met a high standard of UX - took us more than couple of years. By this time, competitors that built a _much_ crappier product got userbase, and hence funding, and then used that to get their UX up to par (sometimes they wouldn't even have the features, they just faked it). We realized our mistake, adapted and stayed in business - but it was a difficult and painful process. So basically - first get things up and running FAST, then worry about polish and laser-cut UX.
  - unityByFreedom 6y ago
    > But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the actual "delighting" process. If these two things are not equal then you're doing it wrong.
    - SifJar 6y ago
      I think the point is you can easily get so focused on making the experience "delightful" that you work on things that would delight you, but that your users actually don't care about so much. And you need to take a step back, build something functional but not necessarily completely "delightful" & then figure out what your initial users actually do care about and iterate from there
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  I think of it like listen to your users, but don’t do everything they ask. Use your judgement to make sure it aligns with your goals, and hopefully you have a goal beyond ‘make monies’.

by fny 6y ago

ss3000 6y ago

That's fair and valid, but shifting your culture from one that's laser-focused on shipping features that work to one that cares about shipping polished features that delights users definitely gets exponentially harder as your company scales in size. The sweet-spot for making that transition is essentially as soon as you've found product-market fit, no later and no sooner, and missing that sweet spot even a little bit can make the transition very difficult and very costly. But the dilemma is, as most successful founders will likely tell you, we're only good at identifying product-market fit in hindsight, long after it happens (and it may never actually happen). I've worked at plenty of companies that pay lip service to wanting to ship polished features that delight users while still overwhelmingly shipping features in a very utilitarian, timeline dominated fashion, long past the point where they've demonstrated product market fit. As with anything in product/engineering/design, it's all about tradeoffs and striking the right balance, and where the right balance stands will always keep shifting under your feet as you make progress...

rlonn 6y ago
There is one way to make sure the product improves after shipping a quick-and-dirty first version: dog-fooding. Be a user, for real. Many seem to think that just using the product equals dog-fooding, but real dog-fooding is when you can honestly say you get real value out of using the product. It is when you'd pay to use it. When you use your own product and gets value out of doing so, you have true customer perspective and your needs are aligned with your customers needs.

unityByFreedom 6y ago

> A trap I see /a lot/ is that people focus on delighting their users before they even know what delights their users or what their users care about. That's odd. The point of focusing on users is to discover what users want. If you're not doing then you're not really focused on users.

shaan7 6y ago
But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the actual "delighting" process. Also, +1 to the parent comment. I worked at a startup where we made exactly that mistake - we delayed releases until it met a high standard of UX - took us more than couple of years. By this time, competitors that built a _much_ crappier product got userbase, and hence funding, and then used that to get their UX up to par (sometimes they wouldn't even have the features, they just faked it). We realized our mistake, adapted and stayed in business - but it was a difficult and painful process. So basically - first get things up and running FAST, then worry about polish and laser-cut UX.
- unityByFreedom 6y ago
  > But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the actual "delighting" process. If these two things are not equal then you're doing it wrong.
  - SifJar 6y ago
    I think the point is you can easily get so focused on making the experience "delightful" that you work on things that would delight you, but that your users actually don't care about so much. And you need to take a step back, build something functional but not necessarily completely "delightful" & then figure out what your initial users actually do care about and iterate from there
dillonmckay 6y ago
I think of it like listen to your users, but don’t do everything they ask. Use your judgement to make sure it aligns with your goals, and hopefully you have a goal beyond ‘make monies’.