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Flexible products cost more to design, implement, and support than simple ones. Outside of expensive tools for professionals (and web browsers oddly enough) the

Flexible products cost more to design, implement, and support than simple ones. Outside of expensive tools for professionals (and web browsers oddly enough) the market seems to have spoken that not enough consumers are willing to pay for that flexibility. (Personally I like designing expressive/extensible products, so that constrains me to working on tools for professionals.)

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
I think there’s a chicken and egg problem here, though: if all the apps/websites an average user uses aren’t designed to make “power users” possible, fewer people will have the opportunity cross the line from user to power user. (In the extreme, I had a former coworker who started as an accountant, discovered he really liked automating excel Workflows with VBA and eventually made the career jump to Software Engineer)
- asoneth 5y ago
  Agreed. Excel is an interesting case. Most of the power and expressiveness was added to support professional use cases but because it's bundled with MS Office it's available to novices as well. At least in my experience, making products for non-professional power users presents a few challenges. First off, you can't charge much for a product that isn't a professional tool. At the same time, power users are (initially) a niche segment so in order to support a development team you probably need something that will appeal to a broad audience. But designing a product that works well for a broad audience and for power users is harder (=more expensive) than focusing on one or the other. It doesn't help that power users can be more demanding in terms of support and feature requests than average users. My experience is that power-user features often get nixed not because any one stakeholder doesn't like them -- often internal folks are themselves power users and think it would be pretty cool -- but because it's often harder to make a good ROI argument for building and supporting power-user features compared to features for the average user.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    I think what this misses is the disproportionate influence of power users: they're a small fraction of the user base, but they tend to be concentrated among the people that are in a position to recommend your product. It's a slightly different case, but I remember noticing that, when Google retired Google Reader, the perception of Google in media and on tech sites seemed to go bad nearly overnight.
    - asoneth 5y ago
      I felt the same way about Google Reader -- I stopped relying on new Google products after it was sunsetted. But Reader has also come up in discussion as a cautionary tale. Because if we do build niche but well-loved capabilities and later determine that we can't afford to maintain them then we run the risk of the kind of backlash that Google got for Reader. Besides the argument that power users can become evangelists, the other argument I've used in feature prioritization meetings is that power users can provide significant utility to the whole user ecosystem by sharing the customizations and extensions they've developed with average users. Having said that, these kinds of features rarely make the cut, and even when they do they're often not as obviously successful as I would have hoped. With respect to the benefit of power-user "evangelism" that's hard to measure. It's hard to measure whether $400k for a few power-user features or $400k in average-user features ends up resulting in more paying users.

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago

I think there’s a chicken and egg problem here, though: if all the apps/websites an average user uses aren’t designed to make “power users” possible, fewer people will have the opportunity cross the line from user to power user. (In the extreme, I had a former coworker who started as an accountant, discovered he really liked automating excel Workflows with VBA and eventually made the career jump to Software Engineer)

asoneth 5y ago
Agreed. Excel is an interesting case. Most of the power and expressiveness was added to support professional use cases but because it's bundled with MS Office it's available to novices as well. At least in my experience, making products for non-professional power users presents a few challenges. First off, you can't charge much for a product that isn't a professional tool. At the same time, power users are (initially) a niche segment so in order to support a development team you probably need something that will appeal to a broad audience. But designing a product that works well for a broad audience and for power users is harder (=more expensive) than focusing on one or the other. It doesn't help that power users can be more demanding in terms of support and feature requests than average users. My experience is that power-user features often get nixed not because any one stakeholder doesn't like them -- often internal folks are themselves power users and think it would be pretty cool -- but because it's often harder to make a good ROI argument for building and supporting power-user features compared to features for the average user.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  I think what this misses is the disproportionate influence of power users: they're a small fraction of the user base, but they tend to be concentrated among the people that are in a position to recommend your product. It's a slightly different case, but I remember noticing that, when Google retired Google Reader, the perception of Google in media and on tech sites seemed to go bad nearly overnight.
  - asoneth 5y ago
    I felt the same way about Google Reader -- I stopped relying on new Google products after it was sunsetted. But Reader has also come up in discussion as a cautionary tale. Because if we do build niche but well-loved capabilities and later determine that we can't afford to maintain them then we run the risk of the kind of backlash that Google got for Reader. Besides the argument that power users can become evangelists, the other argument I've used in feature prioritization meetings is that power users can provide significant utility to the whole user ecosystem by sharing the customizations and extensions they've developed with average users. Having said that, these kinds of features rarely make the cut, and even when they do they're often not as obviously successful as I would have hoped. With respect to the benefit of power-user "evangelism" that's hard to measure. It's hard to measure whether $400k for a few power-user features or $400k in average-user features ends up resulting in more paying users.