Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It's pretty much my #1 example of Google's propensity for shipping its org chart.

Workspace accounts come with their own compliance requirements and edge cases that products need to handle, but rather than do that and provide a consistent user experience most product teams don't answer to the relevant PAs and so don't care, and Workspace accounts are a small enough minority of users that nobody has to care.

I've often railed against a particular way of doing product that's really common in our industry, but I suppose it's been a while so I'll do it again:

We have a real problem with metrics-driven product development, where we exclusively care about the 95% use case and actively disdain the 5% use cases.

On paper it makes sense - you direct your energies towards the highest-payback activities. But the problem is that every user falls into some 5% use cases, so a product that is purely made up of 95% use cases ends up becoming a patchwork that is frustrating to every user, somehow.

Rather than "product works great for 95% of users" you get "100% of users cut themselves on some corner of the product".



What alternative to metrics-driven product development would you suggest?


Humane development Metrics are great, but they aren't humane - there's no single human behind the metrics.


It has been said, a typical MS Office user only uses x% of the features of the software, but every one of those millions of users uses a different x%




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: