This can be Applied to not just Apps. But many other places, and not just Project managers but politicians, civil servants, purchasing, sales, marketing, operation , they all work for their own self interest. Along as it doesn't rock the boat too much.
As Steve Jobs said:
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
> in my days at Amazon Web Services, I saw exactly zero instances of major service releases that, in the opinion of customers, crippled or broke the product
Well yeah, starting off with a beyond-terrible UX is one way to prevent product managers ever making it worse.
Does it count as crippling the product when a new feature has a UX so bad that it makes the entire product worse? I’m thinking of AWS Organizations. The console UX is several steps beyond terrible, and it drove me to find alternative clouds.
This phenomenon is inevitable, at least for any apps or websites that have to earn their keep. The problem is, features need to be added to expand the user base and keep up with, or stay ahead of, the competition. Adding almost any feature will make the interface more complex.
It's true that 95% of the users don't use the more complex features, but product reviews and corporate purchase decisions are driven by the feature set.
The best response I saw there was that it's simply become fashion. Apps change for the sake of changing. The same is true for cars so that people can tell that the older model is older and the newer one is different. It's also in Apple's designs, square edges -> rounded -> sharp edges, thin wedge, slab, etc.
Yup. But, amazingly, The Economist has since released a new version of their app, which is somehow even worse than the regression he describes. It was the first thing I thought of when I read the title.
As Steve Jobs said:
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."