4 ms·

Very true. But then you start selling to Enterprise and everything changes. Because one missing "hygiene feature"* can tank the the whole deal. And every Enter

by tnolet 1y ago

Very true. But then you start selling to Enterprise and everything changes. Because one missing "hygiene feature"* can tank the the whole deal. And every Enterprise has a different one. *like a toilet. It needs to be there. You use it 3 minutes per day. If it is not there, the house is uninhabitable.

mackman 1y ago
As best I can tell we've never sold the same product twice. Product roadmap is "whatever the last person I spoke to asked for." And tech debt maintaining a grab bag of 5,000 almost-but-not-quite-entirely-production-grade "must have" features that the customers rarely if ever use despite claiming that not having it was a deal breaker, is, well, debty.
- xnorswap 1y ago
  The best decision I ever made was moving from a company that acted on the whims of whomever the sales team spoke to last, to a company that had a strong product vision and was happy to say no to their customers on occasion. It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter. You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise your time was given away free to land a deal. Sometimes a deal that fell through anyway.
  - tnolet 1y ago
    Even if you weed out the willy nilly stuff, you will bump into Enterprise users that are actually correct. They will mention something you know you should have added but always wrote off as "bloat" or "not really really really needed". Those things start happening more and more the moment you are doing $100K plus deals.
    - xnorswap 1y ago
      Are you talking about structural fundamentals or product features? Because I agree about the fundamentals, the things enterprises tend to care about: - SSO / SAML / auth integrations - ISO Certifications - Regular Pen tests - Localisation support - APIs ( that they'll never use ) - Bulk operations - Self-hosting ( or at least isolated / non-shared application cloud hosting ) Get these and similar right and it's the difference between landing enterprise or not. But if you're talking about features specific to a product, or custom products for a platform, that's a very different thing, and that's where the great distraction can come in. That's where you'll end up developing features that go unused, and it's these which aren't so consistent across customers. Imagine you make washing machines and get a request for: " This Washing machine must have a pre-set button for a 57deg 38.5 minute wash. Without that, I couldn't consider this machine ". You try to argue that you let users define their own pre-sets, and that they can set up their own pre-set for that cycle. But you're denied by the person in sales who insists that they need exactly that as a first-class button on the front of the machine. That's the level of petty that some large customers will try. In some way, it can be seen as a good sign that they've engaged with your product, but sometimes you wonder if it's just a trial balloon for seeing if you'll put up with the unreasonable.
      - timr 1y ago
        You missed some universal ones that are both necessary, and a total pain: - Teams & Fine-grained Permissions - Audit logging - SOC 2/3 compliance - Data wiping / retention / data policy management - Reporting - Cookie law crap (GDPR & CCPA) - Myriad forms of custom product tiers & billing arrangements I'd put these above several of the items on your list, and in my mind, they fit into the category of "things a developer calls 'bloat', that are actually necessary for enterprise sales".
        xnorswap 1y ago
        It wasn't an exhaustive list, it was to articulate the difference between structural features, which all of those are, and product features, which are specific to your product.
    - pixl97 1y ago
      >bump into Enterprise users What a lot of these HN programmers seem to miss, is it's not about what you or your application provides. It's about what your competition is willing to provide. If you don't have much competition then that's great, but the moment your 100k-10m paying user starts testing the other software your C-levels and sales people are going to have the programmers locked out of the building the moment they say they won't write a feature.
  - polishdude20 1y ago
    I worked at a place that did it a third way: The CEO had a product vision that changed every month.
    - tnolet 1y ago
      Founder mode unlocked
    - rubicon33 1y ago
      Ultimately the vision for the company and the product have to come from SOMEWHERE. Small companies often have the CEO in a product position in my experience. Still isn’t ideal though and more to your point, how they actually do the product role is really what matters. I.e. chasing shiny objects.
      - FireBeyond 1y ago
        Depending on the company's product (and this is a wide range), somewhere between employee 10 and employee 100, the founder needs to decide "Am I CEO of the company? Or CEO of the product?" (As in, that "and" needs to become an "or").
  - nradov 1y ago
    It really depends on the industry. In a narrow vertical market with only a limited number of large customers, the vendors pretty much have to roll over and do whatever the customers demand regardless of product vision. Give the customers what they want or else they'll find a more pliable competitor. The power dynamics are different in more horizontal markets.
    - magicalhippo 1y ago
      If the customer has people on the other end that knows about their processes and cares, you can push back. We landed our largest customer by gar a few years back, and we pushed back hard. However we had good arguments why, and explained why changing their workflow would be much better or offered some other approach to solve the problem that didn't involve a new bespoke and brittle feature. On the other side were a team that knew the processes well and understood our arguments. After they went live, the management thanked us for helping them improve their organization. On the other hand there have been cases where decisions is made by leaders so high up they have no idea what's going on by those that need the tool, and aren't interested in spending time or effort on it. Not much you can do then. edit: Though sometimes they learn. We've had a few customers who we said no to since their wishes were not really feasible, and who selected others and failed, and failed again, before finally ending up with us, on our terms.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    This is one of the things I try to suss out when I interview somewhere. Do you have a product team (or at least someone in leadership) with a stable requirements vision, or do you just haphazardly develop based on whoever your sales team last talked to. Having a stable roadmap is an absolute requirement for me. I may not agree with the roadmap or priorities, but I'd rather have them than not have them. I've worked in both types of companies, and the ones where sales dictated what we worked on this week were universally awful.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      Another thing to be wary of is a product where there are a small number of customers, maybe even just one, who contribute the vast majority of the revenue. Because then, even with a good product vision, it's going to be very hard to say "no" to what they ask for.
  - data-ottawa 1y ago
    I don’t mind this as long as the sales team and management allow the correct amount of time to build it in a maintainable way. The reality is I only get paid because of those deals, and the post deal tech-debt sprint never happens. So the work has to get done and if sales doesn’t give time for it to be done properly then in 3-6 months velocity will drop and the sales pipeline will dry up. Any company that can’t understand that is not a long term company I want to work at.
    - cpursley 1y ago
      HN is largely a US ivory tower forum, lot of good discussions happen here - but many folks are coming from the costal endless “VC” money mindset where company revenue is not much a consideration because they just move on to the next high paying gig when the money dries up.
  - aprdm 1y ago
    Every quarter ? Sometimes I would settle for every week.
- snarf21 1y ago
  This is what I've come to refer to as a Spice Girls sales team. The solution is for the cost of these new additions to come off the top of the deal (pre-commission) they are signing to re-align the incentives.
- rubicon33 1y ago
  Oh my god you just perfectly described the frustration of working in enterprise SaaS. It’s been fun in some ways but the constant churn of almost-but-not-entirely-production-grade software is soul crushing. We celebrate and reward speed to market and lack of process in a way that feels unhealthy and unrewarding. I’ve worked at consumer facing companies but also other enterprise SaaS and have to say I’ve never seen it done like this before. Just ruthless pursuit of features over polish, craft, etc.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Customers buy features, customers rarely buy polish.
    - g8oz 1y ago
      Polish increases customer lifetime value.
      - pixl97 1y ago
        This means really little in itself. Can your customer switch to another product, yes or no. If no, then polish won't happen. Do customers actually value 'real' polish and not just a slick looking UI? If no, then real polish doesn't matter. As a software writer you'll get your ass kicked into the ground by another company that writes catchy features and nice looking interfaces 9 times out of 10. So few actual customers know out to measure 'polish' that it's almost a non consideration.
        rubicon33 1y ago
        Unless that polish has value. Thats the hard part, knowing what features to really spend that extra time on, and which to 1 and done.
didip 1y ago
At least a toilet is fairly standard these days. Not so much with digital only products.
stronglikedan 1y ago
> like a toilet... You use it 3 minutes per day I think you may need to go see a doctor about that, seriously.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  What do you imagine is bad about that number?
bobsmooth 1y ago
>You use it 3 minutes per day. Damn you must get a lot of fiber.
montag 1y ago
I like to call these "windshield wipers." Rarely used yet essential.
taude 1y ago
I had started writing this in a new thread, then saw yours.... "Unless it's Enterprise users. Then 1000 Enterprises all care very seriously about 2 custom features no one else cares about. You had to do horrible things to your code base to support, that will only kick some poor dev in the face two years after you left, and a year after the customer churned."

by tnolet 1y ago

mackman 1y ago

As best I can tell we've never sold the same product twice. Product roadmap is "whatever the last person I spoke to asked for." And tech debt maintaining a grab bag of 5,000 almost-but-not-quite-entirely-production-grade "must have" features that the customers rarely if ever use despite claiming that not having it was a deal breaker, is, well, debty.

xnorswap 1y ago
The best decision I ever made was moving from a company that acted on the whims of whomever the sales team spoke to last, to a company that had a strong product vision and was happy to say no to their customers on occasion. It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter. You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise your time was given away free to land a deal. Sometimes a deal that fell through anyway.
- tnolet 1y ago
  Even if you weed out the willy nilly stuff, you will bump into Enterprise users that are actually correct. They will mention something you know you should have added but always wrote off as "bloat" or "not really really really needed". Those things start happening more and more the moment you are doing $100K plus deals.
  - xnorswap 1y ago
    Are you talking about structural fundamentals or product features? Because I agree about the fundamentals, the things enterprises tend to care about: - SSO / SAML / auth integrations - ISO Certifications - Regular Pen tests - Localisation support - APIs ( that they'll never use ) - Bulk operations - Self-hosting ( or at least isolated / non-shared application cloud hosting ) Get these and similar right and it's the difference between landing enterprise or not. But if you're talking about features specific to a product, or custom products for a platform, that's a very different thing, and that's where the great distraction can come in. That's where you'll end up developing features that go unused, and it's these which aren't so consistent across customers. Imagine you make washing machines and get a request for: " This Washing machine must have a pre-set button for a 57deg 38.5 minute wash. Without that, I couldn't consider this machine ". You try to argue that you let users define their own pre-sets, and that they can set up their own pre-set for that cycle. But you're denied by the person in sales who insists that they need exactly that as a first-class button on the front of the machine. That's the level of petty that some large customers will try. In some way, it can be seen as a good sign that they've engaged with your product, but sometimes you wonder if it's just a trial balloon for seeing if you'll put up with the unreasonable.
    - timr 1y ago
      You missed some universal ones that are both necessary, and a total pain: - Teams & Fine-grained Permissions - Audit logging - SOC 2/3 compliance - Data wiping / retention / data policy management - Reporting - Cookie law crap (GDPR & CCPA) - Myriad forms of custom product tiers & billing arrangements I'd put these above several of the items on your list, and in my mind, they fit into the category of "things a developer calls 'bloat', that are actually necessary for enterprise sales".
      - xnorswap 1y ago
        It wasn't an exhaustive list, it was to articulate the difference between structural features, which all of those are, and product features, which are specific to your product.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    >bump into Enterprise users What a lot of these HN programmers seem to miss, is it's not about what you or your application provides. It's about what your competition is willing to provide. If you don't have much competition then that's great, but the moment your 100k-10m paying user starts testing the other software your C-levels and sales people are going to have the programmers locked out of the building the moment they say they won't write a feature.
- polishdude20 1y ago
  I worked at a place that did it a third way: The CEO had a product vision that changed every month.
  - tnolet 1y ago
    Founder mode unlocked
  - rubicon33 1y ago
    Ultimately the vision for the company and the product have to come from SOMEWHERE. Small companies often have the CEO in a product position in my experience. Still isn’t ideal though and more to your point, how they actually do the product role is really what matters. I.e. chasing shiny objects.
    - FireBeyond 1y ago
      Depending on the company's product (and this is a wide range), somewhere between employee 10 and employee 100, the founder needs to decide "Am I CEO of the company? Or CEO of the product?" (As in, that "and" needs to become an "or").
- nradov 1y ago
  It really depends on the industry. In a narrow vertical market with only a limited number of large customers, the vendors pretty much have to roll over and do whatever the customers demand regardless of product vision. Give the customers what they want or else they'll find a more pliable competitor. The power dynamics are different in more horizontal markets.
  - magicalhippo 1y ago
    If the customer has people on the other end that knows about their processes and cares, you can push back. We landed our largest customer by gar a few years back, and we pushed back hard. However we had good arguments why, and explained why changing their workflow would be much better or offered some other approach to solve the problem that didn't involve a new bespoke and brittle feature. On the other side were a team that knew the processes well and understood our arguments. After they went live, the management thanked us for helping them improve their organization. On the other hand there have been cases where decisions is made by leaders so high up they have no idea what's going on by those that need the tool, and aren't interested in spending time or effort on it. Not much you can do then. edit: Though sometimes they learn. We've had a few customers who we said no to since their wishes were not really feasible, and who selected others and failed, and failed again, before finally ending up with us, on our terms.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  This is one of the things I try to suss out when I interview somewhere. Do you have a product team (or at least someone in leadership) with a stable requirements vision, or do you just haphazardly develop based on whoever your sales team last talked to. Having a stable roadmap is an absolute requirement for me. I may not agree with the roadmap or priorities, but I'd rather have them than not have them. I've worked in both types of companies, and the ones where sales dictated what we worked on this week were universally awful.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Another thing to be wary of is a product where there are a small number of customers, maybe even just one, who contribute the vast majority of the revenue. Because then, even with a good product vision, it's going to be very hard to say "no" to what they ask for.
- data-ottawa 1y ago
  I don’t mind this as long as the sales team and management allow the correct amount of time to build it in a maintainable way. The reality is I only get paid because of those deals, and the post deal tech-debt sprint never happens. So the work has to get done and if sales doesn’t give time for it to be done properly then in 3-6 months velocity will drop and the sales pipeline will dry up. Any company that can’t understand that is not a long term company I want to work at.
  - cpursley 1y ago
    HN is largely a US ivory tower forum, lot of good discussions happen here - but many folks are coming from the costal endless “VC” money mindset where company revenue is not much a consideration because they just move on to the next high paying gig when the money dries up.
- aprdm 1y ago
  Every quarter ? Sometimes I would settle for every week.
snarf21 1y ago
This is what I've come to refer to as a Spice Girls sales team. The solution is for the cost of these new additions to come off the top of the deal (pre-commission) they are signing to re-align the incentives.
rubicon33 1y ago
Oh my god you just perfectly described the frustration of working in enterprise SaaS. It’s been fun in some ways but the constant churn of almost-but-not-entirely-production-grade software is soul crushing. We celebrate and reward speed to market and lack of process in a way that feels unhealthy and unrewarding. I’ve worked at consumer facing companies but also other enterprise SaaS and have to say I’ve never seen it done like this before. Just ruthless pursuit of features over polish, craft, etc.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Customers buy features, customers rarely buy polish.
  - g8oz 1y ago
    Polish increases customer lifetime value.
    - pixl97 1y ago
      This means really little in itself. Can your customer switch to another product, yes or no. If no, then polish won't happen. Do customers actually value 'real' polish and not just a slick looking UI? If no, then real polish doesn't matter. As a software writer you'll get your ass kicked into the ground by another company that writes catchy features and nice looking interfaces 9 times out of 10. So few actual customers know out to measure 'polish' that it's almost a non consideration.
      - rubicon33 1y ago
        Unless that polish has value. Thats the hard part, knowing what features to really spend that extra time on, and which to 1 and done.

didip 1y ago

At least a toilet is fairly standard these days. Not so much with digital only products.

stronglikedan 1y ago

> like a toilet... You use it 3 minutes per day I think you may need to go see a doctor about that, seriously.

Dylan16807 1y ago
What do you imagine is bad about that number?

bobsmooth 1y ago

>You use it 3 minutes per day. Damn you must get a lot of fiber.

montag 1y ago

I like to call these "windshield wipers." Rarely used yet essential.

taude 1y ago

I had started writing this in a new thread, then saw yours.... "Unless it's Enterprise users. Then 1000 Enterprises all care very seriously about 2 custom features no one else cares about. You had to do horrible things to your code base to support, that will only kick some poor dev in the face two years after you left, and a year after the customer churned."