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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

So you’re a PM for a word processor. You have a giant backlog.

Users want to load and edit PDFs. Finnish has been rendering right to left for months, but the easy fix will break Hebrew. The engineers say a new rendering engine is critical or these things will just get worse. Sales team says they’re blocked on a significant contract because the version tracking system allows unaudited “clear history” operations. Reddit is going berserk because the icon you used (and paid for!) for the new “illuminated text mode” turns out to be stolen from a Lithuanian sports team.

Knowing that most of your users only start the app when their OS forces a reboot… just how much priority does startup time get?

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This is an incredibly convoluted hypothetical trying to negate the idea that users notice and/or appreciate how quickly their applications start. Usually as a PM you are managing multiple engineers, one of which I would assume is capable of debugging and eventually implementing a fix for faster start times. Even if they can't fix it immediately due to whatever contrived reason you've supposed, at least they will know where and how to fix it when the time does come. In fact, I would argue pretending there is no issue because of your mountain of other problems is the worst possible scenario to be in.

Many of the important decisions are made at design and review time. When that team adds PDF support, they should act unlike the Explorer team and avoid unnecessary O(n^2) algorithms.

Part of getting this to happen is setting the right culture and incentives. PM is such a nebulous term that I can't say this definitively, but I don't think the responsibility for this lies with them. Some poor performance is simply tech debt and should be tackled in the same way.

$WORD_PROCESSOR employees should be capable of this: we've all seen how they interview.

I don't think that fits MS Office. The situation is more that you have a working, usable word processor which has all the festures your user needs. Since many years ago. But your UI designer thinks it can be a little more beautiful but much slower. Of course you give that way too much priority.

On my Laptop where I am forced by my company to run windows, I run word 2010 and it runs far better(speed and stability) that the newest word I have to use ob my office pc.

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