Comment by jason_oster
3 days ago
> The solution is to gut your product org, replace management with leading engineers, and hire some of your most fanatic users. They don't need to do anything other than give their opinions, and use the product every day. Put them in a room with your top engineers, and the software will mysteriously get better.
I feel like there's this one random comment on HN that should be adopted on its merits alone, but everyone will ignore for no good reason. This will never happen because entrenchment and bureaucracy will strangle every product organization and every organizational reboot attempt.
It's probably the right solution, but the resistance built into organizations assembled by bad decision makers cannot be overcome. Maybe the best you can do is try to find a legal way to spin-off a competitor with a truly fresh start.
I've worked with good product people. They come up with good ideas, have great suggestions, leave latitude for implementation issues to guide some of the design, and work well in the constraints. It is kinda amazing because you might be given a good idea/ticket, and it just flows smoothly and naturally (building on top of existing good product design of course)
Having them around is like 100000x better than having just random engineers be doing product design. And "oh just listen to your power users"... come on folks, surely we know about designing our software into a corner right?
I'm saying all this but am very sympathetic to the pain brought by bad product people (or just like ... mid product people. It's a hard space)
I started using the term “opinionated software” a little over 15 years when I was starting a new company. I built what I wanted as a participant and a fan of the sport.
Lots of other people had their opinions on it (“you’re doing it wrong and everyone wants it this way,” “you must have this feature” which barely anyone actually uses… the power users), but I held fast with my opinion (did usability testing to prove the it was easier to achieve the goals to back up my opinion) and I’m glad I did. It changed an industry for the better.
Excellent usability and functional design that achieves a goal better and easier will win people over.
I also built it with an API so that people can build their own versions of it with the same data, because others also have strong opinions, and I whole heartedly respect that. Some interesting things have come from it that are more targeted for specific users and situations. Pretty cool to see what others make.
While I don’t know how opinionated the guys that created Dark Sky were with it, I would guess that it’s a good example. It was different from all the other apps in their category in the way it surfaced information. Their new app is good (not quite as great as the original), but they’ve really spent a lot of time making a really usable and functional system.
Edit: About that same time in my life, I also realized that I no longer just wanted functional, I wanted both functional and form. I wanted well designed functional stuff. Turns out that people like that too.
I love opinioned software.
If an idea of what the software is supposed to do conflicts with what the software does or intends to do, then the idea is wrong. What product people do (even good ones) is stretch the product to scratch every itch and address every user request, despite the software's opinion. That's Zawinski's Law. (See also the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quote, "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Which unfortunately does not have a pithy name to my knowledge.)
The best thing a product team can do is learn to say no.
> replace management with leading engineers
Wasn't this the whole point of agile and self organizing teams?
Then managers with 10 different PM* acronyms in their email signature got hired in, with no engineering experience, to lead product and software teams?
I don't know if that's what agile was supposed to do, but replacing management with "anyone but leading engineers" is exactly opposite of what GP proposed.
> I feel like there's this one random comment on HN that should be adopted on its merits alone, but everyone will ignore for no good reason.
Because it's populist slop, just like how every long enough discussion about government incompetence will lead to someone proposing all political leaders should be paid minimum wage to fix the problem.
Don't forget, the entire Web 2.0 winner ecosystem of companies that make up our modern Internet was founded by Engineer GodKings who leveraged their product prowess to gain a distribution advantage: Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Stripe, Github, Whatsapp, Instagram etc. They were also the ones who transformed their companies to what they are today, nobody forced them to do this. Contrary to populist opinion, it's not because they were stupid or brainwashed, it's because the proposed scheme has known, predictable downsides that a leader actually has to reckon with while internet commenters only have to worry about preserving their egos.
Taking out the trash is not populist slop. If you have a bad product org, the right thing to do is replace it. If you have a bad engineering org, the right thing to do is replace it.
It is difficult to draw any conclusions other than you like to keep things broken.
Don't blame it all on entrenchment and bureaucracy. Rather show me the engineers who want to become management.
I have thought of the same solution myself before and came to the conclusion that I, for one, wouldn't want to be leading anything even if I had some ideas on why the product sucked.
> Rather show me the engineers who want to become management.
You're talking to one. Wanting agency and responsibility and having the drive to put in the work (for potentially brutal hours) is not exactly a common trait. It's a founding engineer attitude. It should be no surprise that I'm a founding engineer of an LLC of one. I understand that it is not for everyone.
But I'm pretty confident that the blame is well placed.