![]() ![]() This is how we get apps that are all-telemetry dumpster fires and with more and more flashy features fighting each other to grab your attention and fewer and fewer useful 1%-features. ![]() Now scale the above out to every feature in the app, each with their own competitive and motivated Product Manager. Management's conclusion is: "This feature really works and users must really like this feature." So, the product focuses more on developing that feature. Then the next monthly metrics report is in: The feature is now being used by +15% of users since last month! Incredible! Your bonus buys you a Tesla. Make competing features low-contrast gray on gray. Spam the user with notifications begging them to use it. ![]() So, naturally, you're going to do whatever you can to funnel users at that feature. The more monthly actives or new users for feature X, the better it is for you. Your bonus/promotion/career progression depends on some vanity usage metric for feature X. Say you are Product Manager for Feature X. That reason might be that it works, but often the reason people use a feature a lot is it's shoved down their throats. It only tells you that the feature is popular for some reason. You can't use a blunt usage metric to tell whether a feature works or not. > Product managing is also this: I have to know what works and what doesn't. Meanwhile the software that just works, and works well, might check for an update once a month, and the changelog generally reveals new useful features and mentions performance increases. Monitoring network traffic and DNS requests through a firewall and pihole, it’s downright hilarious that it’s the worst products that top the charts in both, even when being online is not a necessary component of the software. And it’s a malevolent spectre if you’re the 1% of users who actually use a niche feature in something, since developers will use that knowledge to take it away.ĭespite a 100-fold increase in hardware power, and languages/frameworks that handle 80% of the workload a developer 15 years had to think about, applications these days have fewer settings, open and run slower, and improve far less rapidly than anything written in C/C++/Java from 1990-2005 despite phoning home with novels worth of telemetry every few minutes. I’m convinced 90%+ of telemetry is simply to have usage metrics to show managers, rather than actually being used to improve products by identifying inefficiencies and bugs. ![]()
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