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That’s why pushing back on features is important. It is super hard to remove them once they are in. Most of the time it goes way that sales people promise some
by ozim 1y ago
That’s why pushing back on features is important. It is super hard to remove them once they are in.
Most of the time it goes way that sales people promise something you build it „because that’s going to be great huge customer” - but after a year or 2 years that huge company moves away because people who originally wanted features moved to other jobs or departments and you are left supporting something some other customer started using by coincidence and is using it in totally wrong way but it somehow works good enough but still initial effort is not paid back and best would be to kill the feature.
- radlad 1y agoThe parent comment seems to imply that roughly 1/5 of their user base each used a different 1/5 of the product. This implies that every feature was genuinely valuable in driving revenue - or at least customer acquisition!
- cantor_S_drug 1y agoWasn't this the same argument which Evernote made for its bloatedness. Evernote’s 5% problem offers a cautionary lesson to tech companies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10842679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10842679
- ozim 1y agoThat doesn’t mean feature paid itself off if you invest with idea that it will be useful for more than 1/5 of users and when feature brings single customer and is marginally useful for other customers. Then also you have ongoing costs of maintaining the feature that no one usually accounts for. Even if customer participated financially into creating the feature when they leave you are left with maintenance.
- radlad 1y agoYeah, there's definitely something to be said about building a large feature for a single customer. It didn't sound like that was the situation here.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago> It is super hard to remove them once they are in Obligatory xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/