Stop Freaking Out: Negative Feedback is your Northstar
If you are like me, when you ship a software product or a feature, you’re filled with optimism. There are a million good ideas, so I’m always working on the one that I think our customers will love the most. When I ship it to them, I’m convinced it will be a game changer. Surely crowds of adoring fans will be smiling from ear to ear and sharing the love on social media within hours.
That does happen. But rarely.
Far more often, you are going to hear from detractors. They are going to tell you that the UI is confusing, the design is hideous, they are running into bugs, it is too slow, it is killing their battery, it would be AMAZING if it only had THIS ONE FEATURE, and that you are ugly and your mama didn’t raise you right.
This is great.
Don’t get me wrong — it can be discouraging to get this kind of feedback, especially early in your career. The trick is to start hearing it like this: “I want to love your product.”
The worst post-launch response is crickets and tumbleweeds. If no one cares enough to even criticize what you’ve built, you really do have a problem. You should take a big step back and figure out why you appear to be shouting into the void. If you are lucky, it is just a PR problem and you need a bigger microphone; more likely, no one is responding because they simply aren’t interested. In that case, it might be time to move on.
But let’s say that something great has happened: you’ve gotten a ton of feedback, much of it negative. Now the hard, meaningful work starts, and this is what separates the pros from the wannabes. No good deed goes unpunished.
Accept that you aren’t smarter than your customers or your community. If they all agree that a certain problem is the crux, then they are probably right and you should focus on that. If they all use the product in the same “wrong” way, it is the product that needs to change, not them. More often, there will be a long tail of smaller usability issues, and having the persistence to iterate and refine as many times as necessary will turn your rough-around-the-edges product into a valuable asset.
Often there is feedback that can shade into trolling and ad hominem attacks. Perhaps you are right to ignore these more hostile responses, but try to put aside your ego for a minute and see if there isn’t something important to learn behind the angry words.
I’ll give you an example from when I worked on Adobe After Effects. I spent more than nine months building the first version of Javascript expressions in AE, which allowed artists to write a few lines of code and create complex motion effects that would take hours or days to arduously keyframe by hand.
A lot of the feedback was constructive and actionable, for example, “I need a way to convert my expression to keyframes,” or, “I’d use this every day if only it could be attached to layer masks.” With each passing version of AE, I added more of these features and helped more customers to achieve their vision and complete their work with less effort. Each improvement might have seemed minor, but I tried to visualize the thousands of animators who were able to produce art they were proud of and leave work a little earlier to spend time with their families. The same is true at ChefSteps. When we make our site or app or chatbot better, it means our community is eating and cooking better.
However, not everything about the expressions launch was rosy: bringing even simple programming into an artistic tool was polarizing. Some artists felt threatened, as if this technology detracted from their skills or that engineers were going to take their jobs. This was never close to the truth. Expressions are just another paintbrush in the quiver; there are super successful After Effects artists who use them on every project, and others who haven’t used them once.
Still, it stung to read the complaints on the boards and forums, and that made it hard to see that there was valuable, actionable information in those hyperbolic reactions. What these users needed, I realized, was a network effect: artists who built useful expressions should be able to share them as reusable presets that others could apply without understanding (or even having to see) the code. For various technical reasons, I only partially succeeded at creating this preset system, but even so, terrific community websites popped up to share useful expressions. I believe that if I had fully engaged with that feedback and put the effort into making it easier to share and reuse expressions, this could have turned into a vibrant marketplace.
When we launched Joule at ChefSteps, we frequently heard, “This is amazing! My burgers came out better than ever. If only you had a guide for venison!” Replace venison with cauliflower, sea slug, and Ukrainian pickled goat milk, and you can readily see the problem.
The easy way out would have been to say, “Welp…we can never produce guides for the endless long tail of foods. It would be too time-consuming and costly. Don’t they see that?” Instead, we took a step back and realized that if we didn’t insist on having highly produced video content for every item, we could support our customers by adding sous vide times and temperatures for hundreds of less common foods much more rapidly. We released this new “slim guides” feature recently and can already see that it is solving a major pain point.
But we won’t stop there. As amazing as our kitchen and content team is, there will always be community members who know more about a given ingredient or recipe, so we’ll inevitably attack the complex problems of user- generated content. Refusing to be discouraged by complaints — indeed, seeing them as compliments in disguise — is going to make Joule vastly better.
So there you have it. If people love your product, great! If they hate your product, great! If they ignore your product…panic.
Michael Natkin has spent the last 30 years building movie dinosaurs, shrink-wrap software, cookbooks, and sous-vide cookers. He was mostly recently CTO of ChefSteps. He’s currently looking for his next role. He’s also written more words.
