How to Turn Hate into Love

Love or hate are the signs you’re on to something. Indifference is to be avoided. - @dcancel

The above represents, for many, a confusing and even troubling statement. If you are aiming to build an amazing product, why on earth would you want people to hate it?

Building a world-changing product is quite difficult, and like any creative effort is largely the process of making thousands of decisions correctly - and fast. Your greatest weapon is your evolving instinct, or what can be thought of as the scent. Being on the scent is key to moving quickly and with confidence, and to shaping the future with tremendous velocity.

When people use your product and hate something, you’ve picked up on the scent. Why do we most commonly hate things? We hate what is different, we hate what is surprising, and we hate what we do not fully understand.

If no one ever hates anything about your product, there is a good chance you are trying to build a “faster horse.” Fierce objections to a feature or approach indicate a break from the traditional worldview, and therefore an opportunity to change the world.

When you find yourself hating a feature or approach, abscond with it. Build it. Mold it, understand it, shape it, turn it on its axis and view it in different light, throw it away and remake it.

Examples

I hate real time analytics. It’s been my view that streaming data is fluff, never actionable, and the architectural decisions required to support real time analytics are catastrophic. It has been said that the one secret to building an analytics application is to never ever promise real time reporting to anyone.

We have some real time data feeds, mostly for debugging and validating data collection, and recently I sought out to better understand real time analytics using these raw feeds. As a matter of fact, it was the result of David prodding me to skunkworks a ‘newsfeed’ feature. True story: when he asked that we build it so we could understand it better, he looked up from his notes, smiled and said “you’re going to hate this.”

I spent a weekend hacking our raw feed into a rough alpha feature that I could expose to some of our customers. The feature as it is will almost certainly never make it into production on a wider basis, but it’s something, it’s real, and we can play with it and understand it better.

Playing with this basic feature has opened my eyes to use cases I had never imagined. As we get feedback from customers the vision for what we can do with real time analytics becomes clearer, and I absolutely love where this goes. Stay tuned.

Another example is our individual view, a CRM-style presentation of a customer showing their interaction history, acquisition source, and so forth. We have the pleasure to work with one extremely talented marketer who from the very start absolutely hated this feature. And why not? She is measuring and optimizing an ecosystem of millions of users, so how could a person-level view possibly be useful to her in her daily work?

As it happens, everything she wants to be able to do that she cannot do with traditional products is made possible by this feature. She loves the way we are different and believes we are changing the world. Her hate of one feature was just more confirmation that we are on the scent.

And being on the scent is pretty thrilling.

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  1. markitecht posted this

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