+ Hi, Pablo here +
+ ++
Your customers don't care that your bathroom is dirty
+The other night I went out with the missus and we went to a fancy pants restaurants, which is unusual for + us. We prefer neighbourhood, simple places.
++ During the dinner, she went to the bathroom and came back horrified: "God, their bathroom is fucking + disgusting". "Much worse than the usual one?", I asked. And she said: "No, but I would expect an upscale + place like this to have it squeaky clean". +
++ I then laid down my thesis on why all restaurant bathrooms, even in really posh places, are always + terrible: "They don't care because you don't really care". "I do care!", she hit me back. "No, you + don't. You think you do: you obviously don't like it, and you would love to see it clean instead of all + filthy. But the truth is, when next month you're thinking about where to go out for dinner, you'll judge + this place and remember the meal, the waiters, how you felt. But not the bathroom. What was the last + time you discarded a restaurant because the bathroom was gross". At this point she agreed, and quickly + drew her attention to the desserts menu. Sometimes I invest too much energy and talk in things people + find boring. +
+The bathrooms of products
++ There are a couple of things we can learn here. +
++ Your product surely has bathrooms. Those little corners that are not the main course, and + your customers don't care about much. You need them. Not having them would be problematic. I don't fuss + over a dirty bathroom in a restaurant, but I'm pretty confident I would remember a restaurant not having + a bathroom at all if it was responsible for some desperate run-for-it trip in search of a place to drop + my bombs. +
++ Your product's bathrooms are those secondary features your customers kind of need, but don't care much + about. It's that export to CSV button. Your customer John needs it to push the data into his accounting + books. The formats of the date columns are weird, and the columns names are confusing, and the fact that + you send a link to his email to download it instead of just triggering a download in his browser the + moment he hits the button, make it all quite cumbersome. But, all in all, it's minor pain. The moment he + uploads it into the accounting software, he forgets about it. +
++ I think it's important to be aware of what those are in your product, so you can prioritise accordingly + and avoid some feature-prioritisation bike shedding. Theoretically, it should be obvious, because you + know what's important (right? Right?!?), and whatever is not important, is probably not important. But + then somehow I still see mistakes made around this type of feature. +
++ I recently had a conversation with my company's CTO about a situation like this. I had some frustration + to vent. We had invested so much time and effort in improving the UI of one of our applications. And it + was so pointless. "There's a good chunk of our customer base that pretty much never go into this UI", I + told him. "They only contact us through a form when they need the service they hired. I don't think they + care about this, and I don't think the nicer UI is going to bring any value to them, nor any money to + us". +
++ That UI has to be there. It's where they check some settings. Reset their password. The boring stuff. + But having achieved being functional, there isn't much more value to provide in improving it. +
++ I think it's important to identify which are your bathrooms and make sure you act accordingly. I find + it's not enough to only care about making the important stuff top priority: it helps to also make it + clear what's not important, and be explicit about it being low priority. Just like when I define the + scope for something, I like to both think in terms of what are we including, and also making a explicit + list of what we are NOT including for the sake of clarity. Theoretically, just listing the positive list + should be enough. In reality, my experience tells me making the negative helps a lot. +
++ So, what are your bathrooms? Are you cleaning them with a toothbrush? Or you have them nice and dirty? +
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