<story><title>Saying &apos;no&apos; to keep crap out of products</title><url>https://blog.orangecaffeine.com/the-art-of-saying-no-db012a22cd28#.sbmur7q01</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>Is it actually possible to know ahead of launching a feature that it&amp;#x27;ll be crap, or is it that most features get launched and the ones that are receievd well by the users are deemed &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; while the ones that aren&amp;#x27;t are considered &amp;quot;crap&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve all written things that we thought would be awesome that turned out to be disregarded by users, and deployed things we thought were pointless nonsense that turned out to be fantastically engaging features that users rave about. Can you &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; tell before you actually get proper feedback (eg the user seeing and using the feature, not just asking if they might like it because users say yes to everything)?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>existencebox</author><text>There was a child post of this which was deleted, but I thought was very on the mark.  (It was likely deleted because it said things about a certain BigCO internals that potentially weren&amp;#x27;t public)&lt;p&gt;That being said, I&amp;#x27;d like to independently re-echo the thrust of that post because I did feel the contribution was key:&lt;p&gt;There are often internal channels in large companies that the boots on the ground use to communicate with each other in a more informal fashion.  I&amp;#x27;ve noticed across multiple companies that this is a FANTASTIC leading indicator for the success of a feature.  For however much flak engineers get for not being &amp;quot;people persons&amp;quot; or however you put it, or needing &amp;quot;Designers&amp;quot; to guide their customer facing work, I&amp;#x27;ve seen significant correlation between popular sentiment and feature success.  Perhaps at the end of the day, enough of our outlook as &amp;quot;consumers&amp;quot; remains to properly instruct us despite whatever programmer bent we may have; or more pessimistically, our own sentiment on what we&amp;#x27;re making subconsciously impacts our output in a meaningful way.&lt;p&gt;So to end this ramble briefly; I think we CAN tell, the powers that be just need to look in the right places, and listen well if they do.</text></comment>
<story><title>Saying &apos;no&apos; to keep crap out of products</title><url>https://blog.orangecaffeine.com/the-art-of-saying-no-db012a22cd28#.sbmur7q01</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>Is it actually possible to know ahead of launching a feature that it&amp;#x27;ll be crap, or is it that most features get launched and the ones that are receievd well by the users are deemed &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; while the ones that aren&amp;#x27;t are considered &amp;quot;crap&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve all written things that we thought would be awesome that turned out to be disregarded by users, and deployed things we thought were pointless nonsense that turned out to be fantastically engaging features that users rave about. Can you &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; tell before you actually get proper feedback (eg the user seeing and using the feature, not just asking if they might like it because users say yes to everything)?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dividuum</author><text>&amp;gt; Can you really tell before you actually get proper feedback [...]&lt;p&gt;Probably not. But even if you built a feature that&amp;#x27;s not well received it&amp;#x27;s important to remove it again. I&amp;#x27;ve seen plenty of projects that carry tons of mostly unused features (or better called technical dept at that point) with them.</text></comment>