From 07bd39d84bbd6bb07867a8e0b6703d907f0c727c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: counterweight <counterweightoperator@protonmail.com>
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2025 00:01:40 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] article

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 ...dont-care-that-your-bathroom-is-dirty.html | 93 +++++++++++++++++++
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 create mode 100644 public/writings/your-customers-dont-care-that-your-bathroom-is-dirty.html
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@@ -105,6 +105,10 @@
             <h2 id="writings-header">Writings</h2>
             <p>Sometimes I like to jot down ideas and drop them here.</p>
             <ul>
+                <li>
+                    <a href="writings/your-customers-dont-care-that-your-bathroom-is-dirty.html" target="_blank"
+                        rel="noopener noreferrer">Your customers don't care that your bathroom is dirty</a>
+                </li>
                 <li>
                     <a href="writings/if-i-started-a-data-team-again.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">If
                         I started a Data team again</a>
diff --git a/public/writings/your-customers-dont-care-that-your-bathroom-is-dirty.html b/public/writings/your-customers-dont-care-that-your-bathroom-is-dirty.html
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML>
+<html>
+
+<head>
+    <title>Pablo here</title>
+    <meta charset="utf-8">
+    <meta viewport="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
+    <link rel="stylesheet" href="../styles.css">
+</head>
+
+
+<body>
+    <main>
+        <h1>
+            Hi, Pablo here
+        </h1>
+        <p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
+        <hr>
+        <section>
+            <h2>Your customers don't care that your bathroom is dirty</h2>
+            <p>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.</p>
+            <p>
+                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".
+            </p>
+            <p>
+                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.
+            </p>
+            <h2>The bathrooms of products</h2>
+            <p>
+                There are a couple of things we can learn here.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+                Your product surely has <em>bathrooms</em>. 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.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+                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.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+                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.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+                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".
+            </p>
+            <p>
+                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.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+                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.
+            </p>
+            <p>
+                So, what are your bathrooms? Are you cleaning them with a toothbrush? Or you have them nice and dirty?
+            </p>
+            <hr>
+            <p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
+        </section>
+    </main>
+
+</body>
+
+</html>
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