How we make users happy

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Building products that people want

First, someone internally will suggest an idea. Usually this will come from Matthew, but anyone on the team can suggest a new idea.

If it requires a new team to build it, we’ll start looking to establish a new team.

If we already have someone internally with the capacity, they’ll be assigned to build an MVP.

The only goal of the MVP is to figure out if anyone will use it.

Once the new product is in a non-embarrassing state (that won’t harm our brand), we add pricing to it and put it on our website. This drives demand.

Then, the goal is to get the product to product-market fit.

Finally, if we can find product-market-fit, we’ll make some sort platform play, like extending the product to enhance everything else we’re working on, or shipping another new product that would work well with it.

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Engineers talk to users and provide support

You should be as close as possible to your users, so you have as much information as possible to make the product great.

For established products with a lot of usage questions, Customer Success helps with support.

We’ll try to use software tools to streamline the process of collecting customer interviews, feedback, and data.

We should aim to “close the loop” with users - coming back with: a pull request, a GitHub issue they can follow in the open, or an explanation of why we can’t make a feature they’ve asked for.

This means the product improves, users are impressed and recommend us to others, and we show users that we listen, encouraging them to keep going through this loop with us, faster and faster.