[chasinglogic]

Definitely, it's also important to remember how salaries vs. infrastructure costs show up on a P&L sheet.

Salaries are going to be considered largely immovable and they won't "go down" or show as a lower number on the P&L as a result of your devs getting some time back. Whereas your infrastructure costs jumping up (even by a small amount, esp if you have any amount of scale) will set of alarms, rightly IMO, in the Finance department.

[pron]

Yep. In developer-targeted products the users are usually not the customers. Making the product appealing to users is (often) necessary, but it's insufficient to convince the actual customer. Sometimes the problem is in the product itself, but often it's just a matter of shaping the marketing message.