Heh. I'm a "Bob" for one of the products my company uses. Everything else you write is spot-on, too. There's one issue with the way their their platform presen

Heh. I'm a "Bob" for one of the products my company uses. Everything else you write is spot-on, too. There's one issue with the way their their platform presents data to our customers that's been killing us - to the point that we've lost sales, and have consequently stopped using a major product feature. I've explained the issue to everyone from our customer reps, to sales engineers, to two successive SVPs of that product area. Everyone gets it; everyone says "oh, yeah: we need to fix that". It's been five years, and I've given up hope that it'll be fixed. They've created another annoyance, which speaks to bad practice. Their reporting tool doesn't cover an edge case that we'd like to address. It's no problem, no one can think of everything; I'll use their data API to build a custom report for myself. Except... their API doesn't expose the one field I'd need to make my report possible. That data isn't a security concern, and is being used elsewhere in their standard reports. From that (and a couple of other examples), their report system clearly doesn't use their data API. Dogfood your APIs, people! (Five years of feedback, and that's never been fixed, either.) For the love of God, dogfood. And, if you're going to solicit feedback from your customers, do something about it, or else explain why you won't. Don't solicit information, nod about it, promise fixes, then not. Don't then do the exact same thing again, with more senior people, a year later. I've built and maintained enough software to know that software is hard. I'm pretty sympathetic towards engineers, and fairly forgiving about software problems. At some point, however, these problems cease to be software problems, and I'm much less sympathetic about that. So, everyone else reading this should take it from "Bob": this guy's advice is how to maintain your customers' faith in your product and your company.