Comment by ftlio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ftlio | Hacker News Reader

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Great read, especially from the perspective of just trying to understand why people overfit certain thinking to certain problems.

My startups perspective: I think it’s hard for people to understand the subtlety from all the memes and hearsay.

We hear that you need to talk to your users to understand what to build, but I’ve seen this fall flat on its face and lead to extreme confusion, several times now, when you’re not talking to your users as a matter of observing your product/business model against reality to then update the axiomatic thinking that (hopefully) lead you to its current iteration.

I’ve seen this play out as a cringy ask to “let us know if you think of any other features you might like” met with puckered faces from customers that essentially said “or how about not because my job isn’t to build your product?”

This is Henry Ford / Steve Jobs talking about faster horses. You’re not asking your customers what to build. You’re asking them to help you understand the reality against which your logic plays.

Then there’s the opposite, where a business marches forward because some axiomatic thinking has determined that the macro environment should support it, not updating itself against a pending catastrophe in cash flows that leads to cuts that further undermine its ability to exist even within its own framework.

Design and test from first principles, but operate for the pain of as many rounds as possible. Maybe one day you can truly optimize and it won’t hurt as much.

> cringy ask to “let us know if you think of any other features you might like”

One of the worst examples I've seen is trillion-dollar corporations like Microsoft basically putting new features to the popular vote.

You can buy from them a cloud service to the tune of a million dollars a month, but if you notice a bug, they tell you to go try and drum up votes from other users on some public forum.

It's insane, to the point where you can point out that their own product A doesn't work with their own product B where literally the only purpose of A and B is to be used in combination and they'll go tell you to upvote a "suggestion" to fix it.

The hilarity of this is that votes (or customer opinions) are hugely biased when sampled like this. If a new product isn't out of beta yet, it has very few users to vote on its features. If a some subset of a product just doesn't work, then users ignore it and then it effectively zero users, so zero votes on its issues.

Potential users cast no votes.

Microsoft has some really perverse incentive structures. Side note, their forums are insane. Most of the "help" is "just run sfc /scannow and then re-install windows" they very clearly do not care to fix actual problems or to help people. They approach problems from a very far distance using a one-sized fits all approach. I think this says a LOT about how ms operates. I do like how Unix is the polar opposite of this. Its very DIY and fix it yourself.

I wonder if Microsoft's "Most Valuable $whatever" program includes a stint at support forums as certification requirement? Because whenever I end up at the help forum, there's always a Microsoft Most Valuable $whatever user present, and they're the one writing the most useless, dumb, and usually irrelevant (template copy-pasting?) responses. It's as if they're doing it to score points outside of the forum.

I think you should be asking about their work, and try to understand their business processes rather than what they want from your software. Then you can spot their pain points and develop features for those. I know this is easier when you’re an internal developer, but the best way we have to spot important features (and the removal of some) is to simply spend a week in the shoes of an employee using the software. Everything which annoys you, annoys your users.

But be sure to ask why business processes are the way they are.

If you can eliminate a process all together, I'd be a happy customer.

Agreed, it’s about understanding the problem they have or the thing they are trying to accomplish so you can invent a new or better way to solve it (or eliminate the need for it in the first place).

> This is Henry Ford / Steve Jobs talking about faster horses. You’re not asking your customers what to build. You’re asking them to help you understand the reality against which your logic plays.

There's also this joke that the absolute scariest thing ever is an user with an idea. As in:

"I need to go from A to B", so far so good, that's what we need to know an act on. Then the user has an idea: "What if midway I could change to a fresh horse?".

I mean, sure, yup, it's been done (changing horse midway to quickly deliver a letter)... But that's not how cars were invented.

Yes. What you ask is just as important as whether you’re talking to your customers. The Mom Test is the best book on this.

The Mom Test also talks about getting the problems from the customer but owning the solution how it solves the problems they have.

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