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This is a clear indication that the user is not the customer. The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wip

This is a clear indication that the user is not the customer. The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out. This happened to the phone handsets when iphone arrived. So, future investors - look at the startups that address the user problems, not the client problems, even though the latter are paying.

cxf12 4y ago
When business pays the ad dollars, the customer is never the user who's policies and features are at center.
fphhotchips 4y ago
The two are fundamentally different. Unless you can devise a way to do BYO expense platform, you're comparing B2B to B2C product development, marketing and sales. Do you think the PMs at Concur just woke up one day and decided to be user hostile because they're asshats? Of course not. They did what the Sales team, and Gartner, told them they needed to give to CFOs so that they would buy it. And then CFOs bought it. Until someone can quantify the benefit of "better UX" to CFOs, or provide that and all the CFO facing features they want, crappy expense platforms will continue to be the order of the day.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  It will be impossible to do any real comparison because the bad stuff is relatively entrenched at most large places. Small quality issues for users would reduce errors, and get expense data reconciled faster. But… by how much? 10%? 20%? No one will care enough to fund a large system replacement for a 10% reduction in expense report filing.
emodendroket 4y ago
> The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out. I find it a little hard to see to be honest. Team members might push to use Slack over some other chat solution because they spend all day using that -- I've seen that happen and work. How often do you do expense reports that you're really going to nag the company to buy your favorite solution?

cxf12 4y ago

When business pays the ad dollars, the customer is never the user who's policies and features are at center.

fphhotchips 4y ago

The two are fundamentally different. Unless you can devise a way to do BYO expense platform, you're comparing B2B to B2C product development, marketing and sales. Do you think the PMs at Concur just woke up one day and decided to be user hostile because they're asshats? Of course not. They did what the Sales team, and Gartner, told them they needed to give to CFOs so that they would buy it. And then CFOs bought it. Until someone can quantify the benefit of "better UX" to CFOs, or provide that and all the CFO facing features they want, crappy expense platforms will continue to be the order of the day.

mgkimsal 4y ago
It will be impossible to do any real comparison because the bad stuff is relatively entrenched at most large places. Small quality issues for users would reduce errors, and get expense data reconciled faster. But… by how much? 10%? 20%? No one will care enough to fund a large system replacement for a 10% reduction in expense report filing.

emodendroket 4y ago

> The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out. I find it a little hard to see to be honest. Team members might push to use Slack over some other chat solution because they spend all day using that -- I've seen that happen and work. How often do you do expense reports that you're really going to nag the company to buy your favorite solution?