Who gives the best feedback? | Hacker News Reader

Who gives the best feedback?

johnsillings.com

77 pointsjohnsillings22 comments

> People with exceptionally bad social skills who actually use your product

> They’re the best. They don’t care about hurting your feelings and won’t sugarcoat when it comes to discussing their issues. They actually care about solving their problem and that’s why they’re speaking with you.

I would have agreed with this one before spending some time in product management.

The truth is that these "tough love" users are actually quite good at providing feedback about what they want you to work on, but it's a mistake to assume that they are representative of your customer base.

It's even worse when it comes to tech products, where many of the most angry and vocal die-hard users have very unique wants that might not represent your typical customer at all. For example, if you dive into HN comments for a product you might hear a lot of complaints about the lack of an API for customizations, lack of a CLI interface, lack of a client for some specific Linux distribution with <0.1% market share, or the fact that the website doesn't work with JavaScript disabled. The people demanding these features might be very vocal and will insert their opinion into every discussion of the product.

But if you allocate engineering time to solving these niche issues, you might discover that only a tiny fraction of your userbase actually cared about it in the first place. Even worse, you might discover that the people complaining still aren't happy because they thought up 3 additional complaints about the new features you rolled out and what it's missing for their specific use case.

This is why product management (good product management) is much harder than it looks from the outside: You need to learn the art of weighing feedback and gauging true customer interest, including potential customers who haven't signed up yet. This means toning down the demands of vocal minorities while also de-sugaring some of the feedback from otherwise reserved commenters.

You're right about soliciting feature requests in niche tech forums. Everyone upvotes and agrees with each other that so-and-so must be done. Then when they're asked as individuals to put money down for what they asked for, they go silent.

The iPhone 12 mini, Gaming on Linux, and other examples come to mind. Lots of empty words, no hard cash.

hey, i own an iphone 12 mini; you didnt get one?

srsly tho, its not an absolute cold cash move all the time, especially when the PM/Designer has some status and wants something for their portfolio at the expense of customer need

also, happy customers dont hand out bonuses and salary bumps. bosses do...

> hey, i own an iphone 12 mini; you didnt get one?

I got the SE as soon as it was out, was the form factor I'd been after so I bought it.

ah nice, I wish i could have held onto my SE for life (water damaged), i would literally buy upgraded internals inside an iphone 4 body for the rest of my life if that were possible

Then when they're asked as individuals to put money down for what they asked for, they go silent.

This handy trick works for managers too ;) I consider it a fork of the 'wally reflector'.

Okay, I'll take my non-sequiturs elsewhere.

Probably the best information those users can give you is why they still use your product if they hate so much about it.

I think it's possible we've become so focused on being gracious about receiving negative feedback that positive feedback is where the underappreciated signal is hidden.

And what happens when those vocal minorities start putting in effort instead of giving you feedback? They get shut down. Made a custom client for the platform the company couldn't care less about? The company shuts it down because it's "unauthorized". Scrape the website in order to avoid the annoying interfaces and javascript? IP gets banned and everyone on HN treats you like you're an abuser. Use a javascript malware blocker? The company detects and blocks it because it harms their surveillance capitalism business.

So we can't ask you to support our wants and needs, but we can't do it ourselves either. We're supposed to just accept your terms and use the products in exactly the prescribed way. Take it or leave it, right?

You are totally free to support your own wants and needs, make your own product. Yes, you are supposed to take it or leave it. Why do you think you're entitled to another company's support on your own terms?

There's no need to actually support anything if it's so much trouble. All the company has to do is leave us alone and stop getting in our way when we fix their products.

Not your product to fix, unsupported usage is still trouble they have to deal with and pay for. When you make your own product, you are of course free to let fixers and freeloaders use your service as they see fit on your dime.

We'll fix it anyway since we're the ones who have to use the product and they couldn't care less. User scripts and open source projects cost companies nothing.

Just do it on the DL with reasonable rate limits and nobody will even notice.

I did. Made a few requests every 24 hours. Less load than browsing the site normally. Still had people labeling me an entitled abuser.

This reads to me as "I talked to this one guy one time, and he wanted to do some things with the product, so I built them and it turns out he was the only one who wanted to do that!". If you find yourself in this position you didn't talk to enough users, don't blame the person who is trying to use your product for your lack of effort.

I was reading here yesterday how all the big players do A/B testing on their web sites. Several current Amazon employees chimed in to say you can't get the simplest of changes through without running an A/B test to ensure it works as least as well with the general population as what came before. Which means of course that Amaozon's web site is highly tuned for the "average" user.

I am unabashedly one of the more techie users Amazon likely to have using their shopping site. I find the search and browse functions so appallingly bad at returning what you asked for (as opposed to things Amazon thinks they might be able to sell you - if I wanted those products I would have search for them for Pete's sake) I've given up using the Amazon home page entirely.

And yet clearly most of the world loves it. One explanation is: how weird am I? The other explanation is this obsession with A/B testing is dragging them towards some local minima that excludes me and a lot of others as well. I'm going with that one.

would be nice if they'd let you choose which sort of algorithms or UI you want. not necessarily that you should have a hundred choices, but having 3-4 'personas' that they could still tune/a/b test against. I suspect they may do this already for various geographies/countries anyway... ?

A third option is that they are so successful for reasons unrelated to their UI, and that the A/B testing is actually just not having the desired effect of creating a good UI.

For example, it could easily be the case that A/B testing is causing them to introduce changes that have a short term positive effect (such as more people buying a product when they visit the site, or even just changes that have a temporary "novelness" factor which wears off after they've been in use for awhile), but a long term negative effect (such as a gradually built dislike of the site causing them to be more likely to shop elsewhere a year or two down the line), and only the former shows up.

I printed this out

as someone who is perpetually in the 'almost starting' phase of a bunch of projects, I think A LOT about feedback, who to accept it from, how to take it. developing a thick skin and ignoring the bad stuff is crucial, but you can't be blind to information so you need to accept some. articles like this are really important. when I meet someone successful one of the questions I try to ask is 'how did advice and feedback shape your path'.

same for management -- when someone comes in hot and tells you something about your leadership style, integrating that properly is a hard skill, and a large part of the job

asking questions is key in both cases -- learn more about how to categorize the feedback, learn more about what information the person has that you don't + where they got it. this is non-confrontational + gets you what you need. never debate

like with everything, empathy matters here, in both directions

"The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick is a good follow-up read to this blog post. The author provides some examples and insight of _how_ to talk to some of these types of feedback-providers. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52283963-the-mom-test

This is so true. Another way to think about this is “nobody will tell you to your face that your baby is ugly.”

Too many products have been built because someone didn’t want to deliver bad news. Ive made this mistake myself. Having an MVP helps a lot.

Is there also a difference on how you collect the feedback. I imagine there must be a difference between face-to-face, phone, video call, email, chat? With different types of communication leading to different results (i.e people not wanting to hurt your feelings).

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