[rogerkirkness]

Customers ability to 1. Punish innovation and 2. Punish a lack of innovation is a little bit hard to overestimate as a Product Manager. Experimentation = bad, no experimentation = also bad. It's like how Google makes some of the best software ever, and also people savagely denounce them every time they kill a failing product. As if they would have learned as fast if they either didn't make the product to begin with or kept it around to languish and maintain.

[tidepod12]

It isn't a customer's responsibility to be a company's guinea pig, and it's not a secret that customers would be unhappy that tech companies treat them as such. This is especially true when Product Managers intentionally implement features that take advantage of users by monetizing their data and then implementing high switching costs that make it even more painful for the customer once the Product Manager ends their "experiment". If tech companies want to perform market research by experimenting on customers, they should do the same thing that other industries do and compensate the experiment subjects, not take advantage of them.

If you want to disrespect customers by treating them like disposable guinea pigs (and not even giving them the courtesy of notifying them they're part of an experiment), don't be surprised if they start to catch on and treat your company as if it's disposable, too.

[rogerkirkness]

The world would have almost no innovative technology if not for a period where customers tolerated "not good enough".