Spent a whole month building a custom export tool because it was the #1 request on our feedback board.
Once it launched, barely 4% of the people who voted for it actually used it more than once. turns out they didn't really need the feature they just wanted to know the app had the option.
How do you test if users actually need a feature before wasting weeks building it?
There's always a endless list of bugs to fix and updates to ship every single week.
But every time i actually get on a quick call with a user i realize half the stuff i just built wasn't even that important to them. It's hard to know when to put down the code and just listen.
How many hours a week do you actually block out just to chat with your customers?
Our team spent months focusing only on releasing requested features as fast as we could. While it helped us gain traction early on making updates eventually became scary because things kept breaking randomly.
We decided to pause feature releases for almost a month just to rewrite the messy parts and fix our testing. Stopping our roadmap felt risky but fixing the foundation doubled our dev speed afterward.
What argument or data do you use to convince stakeholders that cleaning up internal code is worth pausing new feature work?
