How to Tell Your Users You Hate Them

Look, I get it – you hate your users! You simply do not care about them, their feelings, or their experience using your product. And that’s cool! But sometimes users act like they don’t know that, like you’re going to go out of your way to help them or make their lives easier or something. So annoying! Here’s how you can get the message across and put a stop to all that.

1. Prioritize effectively

Make sure you don’t waste time by fixing minor bugs, polishing key workflows, or reducing latency in your application. Work like this will not help you sell to new customers! Instead, always spend your time developing valuable new features. Remember the Pareto principle: 80% is good enough! Mark the last 20% of the work as P4 and put it in the backlog – it’ll get done eventually.

2. Get clarity

When reviewing bug reports, always ask for additional details before trying to reproduce the issue yourself. Most users are just angry people who want to waste your time! Don’t allow yourself to get sucked into investigating edge cases that only affect a small number of people. Remember that you can always close an issue as ‘Intended Behavior’ or ‘Infeasible’ if it’s too time consuming.

3. Always be measuring

Always analyze metrics thoroughly before spending valuable resources to address a feature request or a bug. How many people are even affected by this issue? Even if it’s a lot, it probably doesn’t inconvenience them very much. Ensure the case for addressing customer issues is ironclad before you commit resources to do it. If you’re not sure, don’t be afraid to just deprioritize it!

4. Clear your backlog

Product backlogs can get so long and messy. So many issues! And most of them probably aren’t even well-described or reproducible. If you feel the weight of your backlog dragging you down, simply declare Bug Bankruptcy™! Just bulk-close every issue older than three months with a boilerplate message asking users to reopen it if it’s still affecting them. This way you can clear out obsolete issues and have users identify the most important issues for you – it’s a win-win!

5. Deprecate

Your software is so poorly designed; Joe wrote most of it four years ago and he quit last month… wouldn’t it be nice if you could just start over? You would build it right, with none of the awkward abstractions that make it such a pain to work on. You can do it! Deprecate your product/API/SDK in favor of your new, enlightened version. Make sure you give users 2-4 weeks warning that they need to migrate, and don’t forget to talk about how cool your new internal implementation is!

Whew… doesn’t that feel better?