Hi, Pablo here
Your customers don't care that your bathroom is dirty
The other night I went out with the missus and we went to a fancy pants restaurants, which is unusual for us. We prefer neighbourhood, simple places.
During the dinner, she went to the bathroom and came back horrified: "God, their bathroom is fucking disgusting". "Much worse than the usual one?", I asked. And she said: "No, but I would expect an upscale place like this to have it squeaky clean".
I then laid down my thesis on why all restaurant bathrooms, even in really posh places, are always terrible: "They don't care because you don't really care". "I do care!", she hit me back. "No, you don't. You think you do: you obviously don't like it, and you would love to see it clean instead of all filthy. But the truth is, when next month you're thinking about where to go out for dinner, you'll judge this place and remember the meal, the waiters, how you felt. But not the bathroom. What was the last time you discarded a restaurant because the bathroom was gross". At this point she agreed, and quickly drew her attention to the desserts menu. Sometimes I invest too much energy and talk in things people find boring.
The bathrooms of products
There are a couple of things we can learn here.
Your product surely has bathrooms. Those little corners that are not the main course, and your customers don't care about much. You need them. Not having them would be problematic. I don't fuss over a dirty bathroom in a restaurant, but I'm pretty confident I would remember a restaurant not having a bathroom at all if it was responsible for some desperate run-for-it trip in search of a place to drop my bombs.
Your product's bathrooms are those secondary features your customers kind of need, but don't care much about. It's that export to CSV button. Your customer John needs it to push the data into his accounting books. The formats of the date columns are weird, and the columns names are confusing, and the fact that you send a link to his email to download it instead of just triggering a download in his browser the moment he hits the button, make it all quite cumbersome. But, all in all, it's minor pain. The moment he uploads it into the accounting software, he forgets about it.
I think it's important to be aware of what those are in your product, so you can prioritise accordingly and avoid some feature-prioritisation bike shedding. Theoretically, it should be obvious, because you know what's important (right? Right?!?), and whatever is not important, is probably not important. But then somehow I still see mistakes made around this type of feature.
I recently had a conversation with my company's CTO about a situation like this. I had some frustration to vent. We had invested so much time and effort in improving the UI of one of our applications. And it was so pointless. "There's a good chunk of our customer base that pretty much never go into this UI", I told him. "They only contact us through a form when they need the service they hired. I don't think they care about this, and I don't think the nicer UI is going to bring any value to them, nor any money to us".
That UI has to be there. It's where they check some settings. Reset their password. The boring stuff. But having achieved being functional, there isn't much more value to provide in improving it.
I think it's important to identify which are your bathrooms and make sure you act accordingly. I find it's not enough to only care about making the important stuff top priority: it helps to also make it clear what's not important, and be explicit about it being low priority. Just like when I define the scope for something, I like to both think in terms of what are we including, and also making a explicit list of what we are NOT including for the sake of clarity. Theoretically, just listing the positive list should be enough. In reality, my experience tells me making the negative helps a lot.
So, what are your bathrooms? Are you cleaning them with a toothbrush? Or you have them nice and dirty?