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Killed by design. Companies that build products or services hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. S

Killed by design. Companies that build products or services hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Software is now designed to be hard to manipulate outside of the expected workflows unless you are willing to pay for a software engineer or three (either internally or via aforementioned PS) to figure out.

yourapostasy 5y ago
> ...hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Never ascribe to malice... Having sat on the product side before with some of my clients, I can describe it from their point of view. Power users typically consume a disproportionate share of support engineering and development engineering hours per account compared to their normal user calls from an accounting perspective. The holistic, value-adding way to approach this is to work more closely with the individual power users to find out what they are doing in detail for each of their industries, find commonalities, and push product capabilities in those directions. The reflexive accounting response is invariably "make the power users stop using support services so much". Engineering then gets asked, "how do we stop these kinds of questions?", and the holistic response is shut down because "that costs too much, I want another option". You can see where this is leading...the features power users leverage get sunset, and finance/accounting is happy when they become responsible for a KPI improvement. ...while ignoring that any of them would give their eye teeth for the kind of profit lock-in Excel delivers, and under their KPI regime, Excel power users would have been stillborn. Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incentive structuring. BTW, I usually clarify with leadership what they envision in these situations in a behind-closed-doors meeting that doesn't challenge them. Most of them honestly do not want Excel-like lock-in via power users. They feel it is too fraught a road and that they can achieve lock-in in other ways. Fair enough, and my due diligence advising them is discharged (I might not agree, but there comes a time to help the organization put all its wood behind a single arrow).
- teddyh 5y ago
  Knowingly keeping incentive structures which lead to malicious results is identical to actual malice.
- cxr 5y ago
  > Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incentive structuring. Incentives sounds exactly like what the person you're responding to described. Malice, on the other hand, doesn't show up at all in what they wrote. It seems weird to introduce some element to the discussion yourself, and then work so hard to explain why an explanation that depends on that element is the wrong answer. It amounts to a sort of elaborate and roundabout strawman.

yourapostasy 5y ago

> ...hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Never ascribe to malice... Having sat on the product side before with some of my clients, I can describe it from their point of view. Power users typically consume a disproportionate share of support engineering and development engineering hours per account compared to their normal user calls from an accounting perspective. The holistic, value-adding way to approach this is to work more closely with the individual power users to find out what they are doing in detail for each of their industries, find commonalities, and push product capabilities in those directions. The reflexive accounting response is invariably "make the power users stop using support services so much". Engineering then gets asked, "how do we stop these kinds of questions?", and the holistic response is shut down because "that costs too much, I want another option". You can see where this is leading...the features power users leverage get sunset, and finance/accounting is happy when they become responsible for a KPI improvement. ...while ignoring that any of them would give their eye teeth for the kind of profit lock-in Excel delivers, and under their KPI regime, Excel power users would have been stillborn. Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incentive structuring. BTW, I usually clarify with leadership what they envision in these situations in a behind-closed-doors meeting that doesn't challenge them. Most of them honestly do not want Excel-like lock-in via power users. They feel it is too fraught a road and that they can achieve lock-in in other ways. Fair enough, and my due diligence advising them is discharged (I might not agree, but there comes a time to help the organization put all its wood behind a single arrow).

teddyh 5y ago
Knowingly keeping incentive structures which lead to malicious results is identical to actual malice.
cxr 5y ago
> Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incentive structuring. Incentives sounds exactly like what the person you're responding to described. Malice, on the other hand, doesn't show up at all in what they wrote. It seems weird to introduce some element to the discussion yourself, and then work so hard to explain why an explanation that depends on that element is the wrong answer. It amounts to a sort of elaborate and roundabout strawman.