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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Or more charitably, someone thought "I wonder if users would like this feature", so shipped it to see, and then saw they didn't use it, so removed it to reduce complexity and move on to more important things.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but in my experience few are thinking just about their CV or promotions, and most product changes are driven (at least publicly, within the company) by a desire to improve offerings for users.

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This is Google. You need a major feature to get noticed and promoted. This feature was almost certainly shipped to ensure a pay rise/promotion for both the manager who delivered it and the manager who approved it. This was likely different in Google's early history. Unfortunately, this is how FAANGs and other large companies operate. You can only get promoted if you deliver something that convinces other managers in the company you deserve that promotion.

> most product changes are driven (at least publicly, within the company) by a desire to improve offerings for users.

The key is: "publicly, within the company"

Product Managers are only as great as the last new shiny product feature they deliver. This is a systematic problem for companies. Product Teams rarely prioritise fixing technical debt that is actually resulting in significant operational overhead. They prefer to focus on yet another shiny feature, as it is much easier to market.

"We need to spend some time fixing technical debt for the last product feature we rushed to market, as it generates too many support tickets."

versus

"We delivered dark mode. Shiny!"

I thought dark mode is the cover for "we fixed a load of bugs...and added CSS variables quickly to make a feature to announce".

“improve offerings for users” without basing it on anything other than “let’s see if they like it” is CV development. It gives you an excuse to build something new rather than squeeze out a tiny performance gain in the money machine.

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