[tnolet]

Even if you weed out the willy nilly stuff, you will bump into Enterprise users that are actually correct.

They will mention something you know you should have added but always wrote off as "bloat" or "not really really really needed". Those things start happening more and more the moment you are doing $100K plus deals.

[xnorswap]

Are you talking about structural fundamentals or product features?

Because I agree about the fundamentals, the things enterprises tend to care about:

- SSO / SAML / auth integrations

- ISO Certifications

- Regular Pen tests

- Localisation support

- APIs ( that they'll never use )

- Bulk operations

- Self-hosting ( or at least isolated / non-shared application cloud hosting )

Get these and similar right and it's the difference between landing enterprise or not.

But if you're talking about features specific to a product, or custom products for a platform, that's a very different thing, and that's where the great distraction can come in. That's where you'll end up developing features that go unused, and it's these which aren't so consistent across customers.

Imagine you make washing machines and get a request for:

" This Washing machine must have a pre-set button for a 57deg 38.5 minute wash. Without that, I couldn't consider this machine ".

You try to argue that you let users define their own pre-sets, and that they can set up their own pre-set for that cycle. But you're denied by the person in sales who insists that they need exactly that as a first-class button on the front of the machine.

That's the level of petty that some large customers will try. In some way, it can be seen as a good sign that they've engaged with your product, but sometimes you wonder if it's just a trial balloon for seeing if you'll put up with the unreasonable.

[timr]

You missed some universal ones that are both necessary, and a total pain:

- Teams & Fine-grained Permissions

- Audit logging

- SOC 2/3 compliance

- Data wiping / retention / data policy management

- Reporting

- Cookie law crap (GDPR & CCPA)

- Myriad forms of custom product tiers & billing arrangements

I'd put these above several of the items on your list, and in my mind, they fit into the category of "things a developer calls 'bloat', that are actually necessary for enterprise sales".

[xnorswap]

It wasn't an exhaustive list, it was to articulate the difference between structural features, which all of those are, and product features, which are specific to your product.

[timr]

Yeah, I don't really mean it as a criticism -- my list is stuff that I think is incredibly painful to build, ends up taking >80% of dev time, is messy/spidery, and which I've spent a lot of my life explaining the necessity of to (typically junior) engineers.

In short, this is the kind of stuff that I think fits the parent comment's categorization: it drives enterprise sales, engineers hate building it, and it never really ends because the maintenance and detailed feature requirements change with almost every contract.

[hedora]

On top of that, you have to get messaging right. Here’s an example from consumer:

I’m looking for a TV. I buy after careful research, so there’s a 90+% chance I’ll end up with the TV I have in mind before walking into the store.

One device we frequently use (Linux) doesn’t send the “switch to me” hdmi signal when we start using it, so the “switch input” button on the remote is crucial.

The front runner has a One Button (TM) remote. “What fresh hell hast thou wrought?”, I ask.

On page 1, the manual says to change inputs you need to press the gear button, navigate through the settings menu to “inputs”, and then find the right input from there.

Ok, so do I get the crappier panel to avoid the settings menu every time I turn on the TV, or not?

Thankfully, page 10 has a picture of the remote, and it has a quick change input button, so that’s OK.

On top of that, I want the TV to be a dumb TV.

There’s no mention of this in the quickstart guide, but it has “Basic Mode” that which is that, except that calling something “Basic” is right up there with most four letter insults with kids these days.

As a bonus, after reading the manual, I also honestly can’t tell if it’s possible to have four hdmi inputs and also variable volume audio out at the same time.

If you’re going to produce differentiating features (or your competitors are differentiating you via enshuttification) you need to make that clear pre-purchase.

In enterprise it’s at least 10x harder to get this stuff right because you probably don’t use the product on a regular basis, and also, there are many more features.

[eszed]

Soo... What TV are describing? It sounds just like what I want.

[tnolet]

yep, exactly. We implement some parts of that over the years and it's a hog.

[pixl97]

>bump into Enterprise users

What a lot of these HN programmers seem to miss, is it's not about what you or your application provides. It's about what your competition is willing to provide. If you don't have much competition then that's great, but the moment your 100k-10m paying user starts testing the other software your C-levels and sales people are going to have the programmers locked out of the building the moment they say they won't write a feature.