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Comment by bearjaws | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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