In the last three days, I’ve captured these images, all complaining about product pushes.

There are some unifying themes here, and ones that I would want to know about if I was doing product at any of these big companies.

1. I didn’t ask for that!
2. You screwed up my workflow.
3. This is consuming resources in ways I don’t want.

Now, this isn’t just a straightforward “you should always listen to what people want from their software”, because I assure you that the average professional wants very few changes, and then only to fix things that are obviously annoying, like the “sub-tasks” comment in the second image, or memorably for me, more than one level of “undo” in FrameMaker. We damn near threw a party for that release. But we do have to keep things updated and moving along.

Consent culture in software

In other parts of my life, I teach teenagers that consent is fully-informed, freely given, and ongoing. In my workday, I accept that my company has the right to choose software that I don’t like, software that I find hard to use or unhelpful. I think most of us have had work experiences where the mandate comes down that we’re going to use this email or that meeting suite, because the whole company is switching, and that’s just the way it is.

We have a choice. We almost always have a choice. It’s just that I don’t know a lot of people who have cited “They’re making me use PolyWidgetExec” as a reason to quit a job. Instead, we sigh, we install the new thing, we change our workflows, we may use it grudgingly and with hate in our hearts, but it’s just how work goes.

But look at how angry those users are.

Because they feel they have been forced, or tricked, or coerced, they are actively angry at the software. It’s not a cute little experiment to them, it’s excessive loading times and extended task completion. Some product person has decided that the “tried the feature” metric they are being measured on is more important than keeping the relationship with the user positive and consensual.

We know that user sentiment matters – we wouldn’t measure it all the time if we didn’t. But sometimes the parts of an organization that ask and the parts that roll out feature appear to not be talking to each other, let alone the users.

Counterexample

On the other hand, this just popped up in my Slack today with a cute little pumpkin emoji:

They’re little touches that are like dressing your workspace up for Halloween. The color themes all have creepy names, the status suggests you could dress that up, too, and it even has some whimsy in a randomizer. It’s all strictly optional, it mostly only affects your own experience, and because they asked, I feel included, instead of coerced. And it all goes away again when the holiday is over. Charming!1 I don’t feel like cussing Slack out at all.

The Progressive Delivery angle

I am morally certain that someone at each of these not-Slack companies sat in a meeting and said “Users will not like this. They do not like having things surprise them, and it’s rude to make their work harder without permission.” I have been in those meetings myself. Often the person saying this is not in a position of power. Frequently they have a title like “Accessibility PM” or “Technical Support”.

But in a world with Progressive Delivery, they can point at the instrumented results from the 1% rollout and say “50% of users turned off this feature the next time they opened settings” and then you don’t get the weird numbers games where it looks like everyone is fine with Microsoft pushing voice-controlled computers with Windows 11. (Microsoft says this makes sense, because people spend millions of hours talking to their computers already. On TEAMS they do. Not to the computer. To other humans.)

Progressive Delivery helps teams make better software by making software rollouts smaller and safer, and feedback more accurate and immediate. So maybe we could all be a little less angry.

1. I think there should ideally be an option to say “this is not a holiday I celebrate” and none of the nonsense and frivolity shows up for you on that or any other profile again, but that’s advanced-level user customization. ↩︎