[rtpg]

I've worked with good product people. They come up with good ideas, have great suggestions, leave latitude for implementation issues to guide some of the design, and work well in the constraints. It is kinda amazing because you might be given a good idea/ticket, and it just flows smoothly and naturally (building on top of existing good product design of course)

Having them around is like 100000x better than having just random engineers be doing product design. And "oh just listen to your power users"... come on folks, surely we know about designing our software into a corner right?

I'm saying all this but am very sympathetic to the pain brought by bad product people (or just like ... mid product people. It's a hard space)

[marklubi]

I started using the term “opinionated software” a little over 15 years when I was starting a new company. I built what I wanted as a participant and a fan of the sport.

Lots of other people had their opinions on it (“you’re doing it wrong and everyone wants it this way,” “you must have this feature” which barely anyone actually uses… the power users), but I held fast with my opinion (did usability testing to prove the it was easier to achieve the goals to back up my opinion) and I’m glad I did. It changed an industry for the better.

Excellent usability and functional design that achieves a goal better and easier will win people over.

I also built it with an API so that people can build their own versions of it with the same data, because others also have strong opinions, and I whole heartedly respect that. Some interesting things have come from it that are more targeted for specific users and situations. Pretty cool to see what others make.

While I don’t know how opinionated the guys that created Dark Sky were with it, I would guess that it’s a good example. It was different from all the other apps in their category in the way it surfaced information. Their new app is good (not quite as great as the original), but they’ve really spent a lot of time making a really usable and functional system.

Edit: About that same time in my life, I also realized that I no longer just wanted functional, I wanted both functional and form. I wanted well designed functional stuff. Turns out that people like that too.

[jason_oster]

I love opinioned software.

If an idea of what the software is supposed to do conflicts with what the software does or intends to do, then the idea is wrong. What product people do (even good ones) is stretch the product to scratch every itch and address every user request, despite the software's opinion. That's Zawinski's Law. (See also the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quote, "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Which unfortunately does not have a pithy name to my knowledge.)

The best thing a product team can do is learn to say no.