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by jrochkind1 2188 days ago
> helped us break away from preconceived notions based on what is easy and incremental to build on top of the Dropbox stack.

In my experience, this is one of the biggest challenges for developers involved in product design, expressed succinctly there.

And to try to step out of this is why it's so important to have product owners/managers who are NOT technical staff, and who technical staff doesn't unduly influence. When you've invested your time and energy in building a hammer, you really want to figure out how to treat anything as a nail.
1 comments
yjftsjthsd-h 2188 days ago
> When you've invested your time and energy in building a hammer, you really want to figure out how to treat anything as a nail.

And to be fair, this is reasonable, right up until it isn't. When every tool costs onboarding and maintenance effort, it makes sense to leverage as few tools as possible to the greatest effect - but much as "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler", you want the fewest tools that will do the job well, but sometimes that is N+1, and a new tool will pay for itself.

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jrochkind1 2188 days ago
Absolutely.

But it's really hard to tell when it is and isn't reasonable, when it comes to UX.

I find that the only thing you can do is try to have peopel who aren't developers and don't even know what's "easy to build incrementally on top of the existing stack" determining the appropriate UX for the customer/market/business need.

Then the developers can say "OK, but if we did it like THIS, it would be a lot cheaper to implement because we can incrementally add to what we've got", and the product manager/owner can push back "Eh, that's not going to meet the market need", "OK, but we can't afford it" -- it's a negotiation. But in my experience you really have to have someone who isn't a developer at all standing up for the user need, for anyone who will be involved in the implementation, no matter how smart and user-centered, it's just too tempting to decide that the thing that can be met with the incremental change to existing stack is "nearly as good" no matter what, when it's so much easier and more elegant under the hood.

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