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They matter to builders that care. While software may deliver value, and the business makes money at this moment in time, a disregard for quality over time woul
by iamwil 3y ago
They matter to builders that care. While software may deliver value, and the business makes money at this moment in time, a disregard for quality over time would create an environment that pushes out builders that care. And when you have people building product that don't care, it's hard to argue they'd care for the customer either. The slippery slope argument, I know. But "how you do anything is how you do everything."
That said, the surface area for any product is huge. It makes sense to prioritize paper cuts that have ROI. Otherwise, you'd never ship. And it is fundamentally true that customers buy and use because it gets their job-to-be-done finished, despite the paper cuts they'd have to wade through.
But like our most closely-held ideals, we may never reach them, but it doesn't mean we should stop trying entirely. Besides, once they find an alternative, or a competitor becomes viable, they'll switch. Paper cuts don't matter, until they do. It's a debt of another kind, where the piper will always come knocking eventually.
- dsugarman 3y agoI think you have to define quality. If you define quality as the absence of annoyances I think you're probably over optimizing the wrong thing. You want to provide a clear, fast path for users to solve their problems and at scale you have to prioritize providing paths to solving big problems for users rather than fixing the volume of small annoyances, it's incredibly more impactful.
- JohnFen 3y agoFrom a business point of view, this depends on your competition. If there's a competing product that solves problems as well as yours, having fewer warts is a powerful competitive advantage. From a craft point of view, they all matter a lot. We all want to make products that are actually good on every level, right? But, as you say, you can't optimize for everything.