Respect Your Power Users
tedium.co
tedium.co
The foremost often can be maintainers of communities. Example: Reddit or Discord. These same communities might end up being the main part of your product. Other examples include social media like Youtube, or even Instagram.
To these users a different set of power tools are needed, than for the "technical power users" who need different kinds of power tools.
For the "very active users", you might want to be able to provide things like UI customization, social media linking, statistics and easy tools for moderation.
Examples of tools for "technical power users" might be providing a large set of actions that can be custom-key-bound. A macro/scripting API. An alternate API to your service completely (REST-ful), or support for modding. You can guess what those tools will later be used for quite simply I'm sure. :)
Please look after your power users! Maintaining their trust is critical.
Before, the Mac was a big deal in graphics and other areas like that, but didn't really have an inroad to people who wanted to code. Shifting to OSX created a platform with all the power of Linux under the hood, but with access to the COTS tools that many people prefer/need.
I was part of this. In the early 21st century, I was doing lots of LAMP stack work, and you could just install everything locally on your Mac, build and test locally, and then rsync up to the test server for broader evaluation. I think this was partly inadvertent, but Apple doesn't do anything accidentally.
So all of a sudden, you'd go to tech confs for things like Ruby or Python, and see a roomful of glowing Apple logos. Because deliberately or not, the platform respected the power user.
People are upset now b/c they fear the iOS-ification of what we now call MacOS. I'm not convinced it's happening in any meaningful sense (I can still build and run whatever I want), but it's probably worth watching. Any move away from the "perfect hybrid" that OSX was in, say, 2002, is scary/unwelcome, even if the moves are things that are probably good ideas for normal people, and easily circumvented for power users (like a default restriction to signed code).
Even better: It had all the power of BSD under the hood.
And maybe they don't care about Apple spending 30 minutes to brag about how their Macbook just got 0.2mm thinner. But they might still consider the purchase if it doesn't come with a touchbar and another broken keyboard.
But they can also be down-right arrogant and self-centered ;)
I think the scale of influence the article is talking about is bigger than personal circles and is focusing more on huge user bases. The power users I deal with daily are a mixed bunch; some are very earnest in their pursuit of using our product to its fullest extent, which is great; they open themselves up to risk by pushing new features their limits, and we're willing to work with them as they continue to invest further into us. This is great because in this scenario we have the same end goals, so it works out and it's a good investment for everyone involved.
For some power users though, as soon as our goals deviate and we're no longer looking in the same direction for a given feature/product, it's like a really bad break up, and quite a few do not like to take it silently or easily. I have some that have been threatening to leave the product for 3+ years because we've elected not to invest resources further into a specific feature (low demand, market is turning away from this feature, the investment is simply too great at this point to justify the cost). But they never leave, for reasons I'm not going to speculate on.
The way that our power users act regarding such decisions is frankly borderline harassment at times; spamming forum posts, harassing our support team with endless cases just to complain about a feature they know we don't have, it can eat up a lot of time. The power users insist they are right, and that our decision is 'a huge mistake we just don't understand', and they continue to remind us of this -- it's hard to not consider the attitudes arrogant, and the language used to describe themselves feels a bit too self-congratulatory.
Frankly speaking I don't like the tone of the article even if I agree with some of its points as it sounds too much like the bad users mentioned above.
So as with all things, it's best with moderation and constant doses of reality. Without these checks, it's easy to get a very bad relationship set up and such relationships take a lot to advance to a more stable position.
Just curious, what happens if you tell them why you've chosen not to invest in the feature they want?
We try to be very transparent about whether or not something's on the roadmap, or why it's not when it's not.
The point I was trying to make is that often, the power users don't take it very well at all. Most of the time it's just disappointment, but we will often get a variety of flawed arguments in response to our reasoning, which I get is just frustration that they aren't getting their request.
Edit for further comments:
If you're honestly curious on the array of responses, usually it's just continual expressions of disappointment that we aren't.
Some of the more adamant users will do one or more of the following:
- insist our data is wrong
- insist our prediction is wrong
- insist the market is wrong
- demand the feature anyways
- insist it's not that much of a development time sink
- ignore all the reasons and just post complaints
and of course much more.
It's normal, of course, and it does tend to be a smaller subset of users, but there are enough that they keep me busy week in and out.
I assumed you did, I've just never been responsible for responding to customers so I was curious about what power users say.
I wonder if a solution is to let them add their feature to your software (like browser addons)? Of course, this doesn't work for all kinds of software, and maintaining the addon API would be added work, but it might appease power users.
>I wonder if a solution is to let them add their feature to your software (like browser addons)?
In fact we have a powershell integration and RESTAPI they can develop on. But the simple fact is that a lot of these users don't want it, they want it baked into the product core functionality since we don't personally support such custom projects. We offer that we will validate that all the endpoints work correctly, but that's it, and for medium larger businesses, this typically is a "no go". It's either baked in feature, or it's not a feature.
Even for the smaller "power users", most of the time they don't want to take the time to develop the functionality themselves (which I get, it's time consuming to develop). But the option is there, just not utilized.
Finally one of our field techs met him in person. Turns out the guy was 700+ pounds (300+ kg) and just absolutely miserable. He was as hated at his own job as he was at our office. Somehow he saw us as his surrogate family and I guess decided to treat us the way he’d been treated. Really a sad case overall. I often wonder what ended up happening to him after our company folded.
There are some strange, strange people out there. Coddle them at your peril.
Most of the time these posts are just rants, which might be true, but may not provide a sufficiently compelling/research-driven case for product managers.
Anecdotally, I've noticed Zoomers are less inclined to be power users themselves. If true, I blame software monocultures and pseudo-computing (phones).
What I am thinking of is, someone who was a programmer ~20 years ago would probably have a lot of *NIX, IT, and networking skills that you could take for granted, whereas today there are coders from many different backgrounds (which isn't necessarily bad).
I've met a surprising number of 20-year-olds who spend their entire day in Visual Studio Code and don't know that Home/End go to the beginning and end of the line. Or they don't know how DNS works. Just two examples off the top of my head.