Item — HN Reader

> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it.

my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place.

also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it.

sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.

2 comments

I think it depends on what exactly happened.

If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.

But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.

> But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say

Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.

Yes. Definitely there's a sweet spot here, in terms of how locked in you are, tied into the ecosystem. A company may have time to course correct, if there is some pain for customers leaving.

At least, more room than if not.

I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.

Getting funding for meatspace projects is beyond what most VCs will do, and I'm sure this is adjacent to that. I literally have about 10 different hardware projects that are all viable, all leading edge, all minor to develop, along with a strong software component (which is where the juice is).

Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them.

Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.

An example of this was JetBrains' initial subscription plan.

Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).

I go back and forth on this. Maybe it is the right inclination with software development where there is a strong drive to keep pushing more features and trade offs in terms of “technical debt” or footprint can get pretty abstract at scale. But then I think of an operation like the Disney Parks and it really seems like the delight comes from constant, sustained effort. They’ve got people around attending to everything and fussing over every little detail around the park. They can emergency dispatch characters to an area if they see kids who seem like they might start to have a bad time. They have secret stashes of diaper changing kits and first aid materials so Mickey Mouse can show up and save the day if someone has an accident. There’s ways they’re not ruining it I guess, but the main impression I get is that they just never take their foot off the gas when it comes to making sure everyone is having a good time.

All of the things you described ARE "it". They're part of the Disney Parks "product". If they were to remove or change that active effort, that could be considered "ruining it". But continuing to operate in a way they've found delights their customers is exactly what Seth is arguing for, not a violation of it.