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Comment by 4death4 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn’t say you have to cater to middle management instead of the end user. You just can if you want to. Of course you need to consider what middle management needs, since they’re paying you, but there is usually room for craftsmanship to bring a truly great UX to the end user. Most software engineers are lazy and lack a true sense of craft, so they usually skip building a great UX when it’s not a requirement.

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In enterprise software, you cater exclusively to management, they will turn a blind eye to 99% of issues as long as the team is able to get the work done.

Take one look at EMRs and realize that its sold / marketed to .01% of the hospital, despite 80% of the health system using it.

> In enterprise software, you cater exclusively to management, they will turn a blind eye to 99% of issues as long as the team is able to get the work done.

Again, you can exclusively cater to management, but you don’t have to. Look at Datadog. It’s a great product, but still ultimately purchased by management.

Some organizations listen to their engineers/users too in the buy decision. Effective products do both - cater to management checklists, and cater to end user experiences.

Also, look at their competition. New Relic's product is so painful and broken that despite successfully winning deals with many large companies, they still manage to lose business to Datadog as their end users work extremely hard to convince management to not renew, and switch to Datadog, for the good of the company. Ask any insider.

Catering to a mixture of management and users helps sales. Having a product that users (reports) love will get your product to have internal advocates. Some managers are self centered jerks, but most will at least consider their reports advocacy if the product also has the features they need.

> Most software engineers are lazy and lack a true sense of craft, so they usually skip building a great UX when it’s not a requirement.

From my observations, it's usually not that devs are lazy or lack a sense of craft, it's that their employers are not willing to spend money building something that isn't actually a requirement.

That doesn’t explain why the functionality that is there is usually buggy and lackluster.

Because being bug free and lustrous isn't something that people are willing to pay for.

the explanation is simple - the immutable law of resource allocation:

"good, fast, cheap: pick two"

> so they usually skip building a great UX when it’s not a requirement

or worse think they are good at it. Then guard that GUI like it is their first born.

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