Ask HN: What is your product development workflow? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your product development workflow?

2 pointsseekingcharlie3 comments

I'm leading design & PM in a small team. Even with a QA team, we're suffering with product quality which I'm attributing to our CEO's desire to add new features instead of fixing the core. As a designer, it's not even that I care about getting everything to 100% perfection - I'd settle for 70% at this stage.

For example, we allow managers to access Timesheets for when their hourly/shift employees worked. Users have reported severe issues with the current implementation. We've designed a new version that replicates the current functionality but includes some new features.

I'm in the camp of wanting to rebuild the current version, removing the things that users hate now, then add the new, "delight" features later on. CEO disagrees & wants to build the new features with the rationale that "current version is functional so new features will have the most value".

This is just one specific example, but it's a pattern within our development process. As such, we've ended up with several sections of our app that even members of our team just don't want to look at because they're so janky (i.e. they were released out of MVP mentality & then never polished). I feel like for every new feature we add, we end up with 150 new bug tickets filed in PT that I have to prioritize. Can't we just take our 3 core features, make them 95% effective & then move onto everything else? I totally understand that Investors like new features, but they like paying users more & people are paying for these 3 core features. Am I thinking about this in the wrong way?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Are the users leaving because of reported severe issues? Are the revenue declining? Can you related revenue decline to reported "severe" issues? Do you know or understand the constraints your CEO is working under? While there may be merits to your and developers' concern, you also need to understand the priorities of CEO.

I have stopped counting the number of times, I hear developers wanting to redo the current version. Every time, there is a new developer or a developer with new technology/language skill, the rallying cry is always how the current version sucks and we should be rewriting it.

CEO priority is to make sure business stays as an on-going concern. S/he can't afford to stop the business so that you can rewrite and make current version look pretty in your favorite framework/ technology/ style of the day. You need to be customer driven and customer focus.

As long as customers keep using current version and not leaving, your goal is to delight them enough to keep them from leaving, keep adding value so that they stick around and new ones come onboard. The revenue from customers is what makes the whole thing work from you and CEO continuing to pay bills, get paid what they may be worth on regular basis and may get raises time to time.

Remind your CEO that retaining existing users is a lot cheaper than acquiring new users, and that the existing users bought in without the new shiny stuff so fixing the features you know they want is important. Remind him hourly. With charts.

Totally what onion2k said.

SOS (shiny object syndrome) is the death of almost all products, teams and companies in my opinion. You are better of having 50% of the features but high quality and then add one or two key features every month, quarter etc but have them be rock solid. This is of course, the idea once you have paying customers. Up to that point its a bit more fast and loose to get customers paying and on the line.

The problem will be if your CEO isn't seeing user attrition and is spending most of his time talking to prospects then he will only be hearing comments like, well if you had X, blah blah blah... If you have a support desk, ask him to sit on it for 2 hours and answer questions from users, make sure you pick the peak time. This can also be a little dangerous if he is the volatile type person, but usually it helps most people change the conversation in their head from shiny shit to damn it let's put some priority on existing issues for clients. I think that is also the point of onion2k's comment about give him reports hourly if necessary to show the details. I just found that getting a CIO, CEO etc to physically have to do something like sit on the support desk or go talk to existing clients with issues makes a bigger impact than a report, but they go hand in hand.

It is about helping him change the conversation in his head, he obviously doesn't want to see the company do poorly or have clients leaving, but he likely is marketing focused and so looses track of existing clients to some degree. This isn't uncommon just something that can lead to SOS and then an eventual death spiral if not caught. The opposite is the internally focused CEO that isn't talking with prospects or gaining new clients because he/she isn't looking at how to grow the product, and that can spell death just as fast if other people don't fill that void.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com