[HN Gopher] Who gives the best feedback?
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Who gives the best feedback?
Author : johnsillings
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-11-27 23:17 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (johnsillings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (johnsillings.com)
| gumby wrote:
| This is so true. Another way to think about this is "nobody will
| tell you to your face that your baby is ugly."
|
| Too many products have been built because someone didn't want to
| deliver bad news. Ive made this mistake myself. Having an MVP
| helps a lot.
| awinter-py wrote:
| I printed this out
|
| as someone who is perpetually in the 'almost starting' phase of a
| bunch of projects, I think _A LOT_ about feedback, who to accept
| it from, how to take it. developing a thick skin and ignoring the
| bad stuff is crucial, but you can 't be blind to information so
| you need to accept some. articles like this are really important.
| when I meet someone successful one of the questions I try to ask
| is 'how did advice and feedback shape your path'.
|
| same for management -- when someone comes in hot and tells you
| something about your leadership style, integrating that properly
| is a hard skill, and a large part of the job
|
| asking questions is key in both cases -- learn more about how to
| categorize the feedback, learn more about what _information_ the
| person has that you don 't + where they got it. this is non-
| confrontational + gets you what you need. never debate
|
| like with everything, empathy matters here, in both directions
| Taylor_ wrote:
| Is there also a difference on how you collect the feedback. I
| imagine there must be a difference between face-to-face, phone,
| video call, email, chat? With different types of communication
| leading to different results (i.e people not wanting to hurt your
| feelings).
| zethus wrote:
| "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick is a good follow-up read to
| this blog post. The author provides some examples and insight of
| _how_ to talk to some of these types of feedback-providers.
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52283963-the-mom-test
| [deleted]
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > People with exceptionally bad social skills who actually use
| your product
|
| > They're the best. They don't care about hurting your feelings
| and won't sugarcoat when it comes to discussing their issues.
| They actually care about solving their problem and that's why
| they're speaking with you.
|
| I would have agreed with this one before spending some time in
| product management.
|
| The truth is that these "tough love" users are actually quite
| good at providing feedback about what _they_ want you to work on,
| but it 's a mistake to assume that they are representative of
| your customer base.
|
| It's even worse when it comes to tech products, where many of the
| most angry and vocal die-hard users have very unique wants that
| might not represent your typical customer at all. For example, if
| you dive into HN comments for a product you might hear a lot of
| complaints about the lack of an API for customizations, lack of a
| CLI interface, lack of a client for some specific Linux
| distribution with <0.1% market share, or the fact that the
| website doesn't work with JavaScript disabled. The people
| demanding these features might be _very_ vocal and will insert
| their opinion into every discussion of the product.
|
| But if you allocate engineering time to solving these niche
| issues, you might discover that only a tiny fraction of your
| userbase actually cared about it in the first place. Even worse,
| you might discover that the people complaining still aren't happy
| because they thought up 3 additional complaints about the new
| features you rolled out and what it's missing for their specific
| use case.
|
| This is why product management (good product management) is much
| harder than it looks from the outside: You need to learn the art
| of weighing feedback and gauging true customer interest,
| including potential customers who haven't signed up yet. This
| means toning down the demands of vocal minorities while also de-
| sugaring some of the feedback from otherwise reserved commenters.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| And what happens when those vocal minorities start putting in
| effort instead of giving you feedback? They get shut down. Made
| a custom client for the platform the company couldn't care less
| about? The company shuts it down because it's "unauthorized".
| Scrape the website in order to avoid the annoying interfaces
| and javascript? IP gets banned and everyone on HN treats you
| like you're an abuser. Use a javascript malware blocker? The
| company detects and blocks it because it harms their
| surveillance capitalism business.
|
| So we can't ask you to support our wants and needs, but we
| can't do it ourselves either. We're supposed to just accept
| your terms and use the products in exactly the prescribed way.
| Take it or leave it, right?
| themacguffinman wrote:
| You are totally free to support your own wants and needs,
| make your own product. Yes, you are supposed to take it or
| leave it. Why do you think you're entitled to another
| company's support on your own terms?
| willcipriano wrote:
| This reads to me as "I talked to this one guy one time, and he
| wanted to do some things with the product, so I built them and
| it turns out he was the only one who wanted to do that!". If
| you find yourself in this position you didn't talk to enough
| users, don't blame the person who is trying to use your product
| for your lack of effort.
| hitekker wrote:
| You're right about soliciting feature requests in niche tech
| forums. Everyone upvotes and agrees with each other that so-
| and-so must be done. Then when they're asked as individuals to
| _put money down_ for what they asked for, they go silent.
|
| The iPhone 12 mini, Gaming on Linux, and other examples come to
| mind. Lots of empty words, no hard cash.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _Then when they 're asked as individuals to put money down
| for what they asked for, they go silent._
|
| This handy trick works for managers too ;) I consider it a
| fork of the 'wally reflector'.
|
| Okay, I'll take my non-sequiturs elsewhere.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| hey, i own an iphone 12 mini; you didnt get one?
|
| srsly tho, its not an absolute cold cash move all the time,
| especially when the PM/Designer has some status and wants
| something for their portfolio at the expense of customer need
|
| also, happy customers dont hand out bonuses and salary bumps.
| bosses do...
| Ntrails wrote:
| > hey, i own an iphone 12 mini; you didnt get one?
|
| I got the SE as soon as it was out, was the form factor I'd
| been after so I bought it.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| ah nice, I wish i could have held onto my SE for life
| (water damaged), i would literally buy upgraded internals
| inside an iphone 4 body for the rest of my life if that
| were possible
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| I was reading here yesterday how all the big players do A/B
| testing on their web sites. Several current Amazon employees
| chimed in to say you can't get the simplest of changes through
| without running an A/B test to ensure it works as least as well
| with the general population as what came before. Which means of
| course that Amaozon's web site is highly tuned for the
| "average" user.
|
| I am unabashedly one of the more techie users Amazon likely to
| have using their shopping site. I find the search and browse
| functions so appallingly bad at returning what you asked for
| (as opposed to things Amazon thinks they might be able to sell
| you - if I wanted those products I would have search for them
| for Pete's sake) I've given up using the Amazon home page
| entirely.
|
| And yet clearly most of the world loves it. One explanation is:
| how weird am I? The other explanation is this obsession with
| A/B testing is dragging them towards some local minima that
| excludes me and a lot of others as well. I'm going with that
| one.
| lowercased wrote:
| would be nice if they'd let you choose which sort of
| algorithms or UI you want. not necessarily that you should
| have a hundred choices, but having 3-4 'personas' that they
| could still tune/a/b test against. I suspect they may do this
| already for various geographies/countries anyway... ?
| jrumbut wrote:
| Probably the best information those users can give you is why
| they still use your product if they hate so much about it.
|
| I think it's possible we've become so focused on being gracious
| about receiving negative feedback that positive feedback is
| where the underappreciated signal is hidden.
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(page generated 2021-11-30 23:01 UTC)