
Why Products Suck (And How To Make Them Suck Less)  - dave1619
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/06/why-products-suck-and-how-to-make-them-suck-less/
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jpwagner
Don't take a feature request at face value, translate it into a request to fix
a problem.

Customers will always solve your problems poorly. If they didn't they would be
in your business.

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MicahWedemeyer
I'd say that sucky features don't lose you customers, they lose you time. My
users have never (to my knowledge) quit in disgust over a poorly implemented
feature, but they complain a lot about them and send me support requests if
they're confused. This means I'm often re-explaining the same things or
dealing with the same problems over and over. You spend your time either
supporting or fixing it.

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texel
3 and 5 are corollaries, and probably the most useful points in the article.
It's so easy to get caught up implementing customer requests, especially when
they wave money at you. It's much harder to stick to your guns and/or distill
their requests into feature sets that do what they _actually_ want, rather
than what they asked for.

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avk
I enjoyed this: "The fastest racecar can’t move if the gas-cap gets stuck;
your product is only as good as its worst component." It reminds me of Dave
McClure's "something in your product sucks, find it, kill it" (paraphrased).

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alexro
Have these guy ever applied to YC?

