I needed a scheduling solution that let me tweak a bunch of knobs regarding when I was available, for what, how much that cost, how that payment could be processed, my team, different locations, how full to book me, which notifications to send to whom and when, which data I needed to gather for each type of appointment or package of appointments, and, and, and, and before you know it I've given the developer 5 years worth of feature requests, and I'm just one of their customers.
Hey - one of the cofounders here. It’s exactly this.
I totally get the point that’s being made, but to be able to have a product which is good enough to sell, we have to be able to cater to the hundreds of features that customers tell us we need.
Everything we build is entirely community and customer demand driven, so effectively all of these features are in place to support every different use case that customers require as part of their scheduling needs.
We are looking at ways to make the app simpler, with the advanced options still readily available for those who need it. For example, some of our advanced features are hidden as apps which you install to be able to see their options. However if anyone here has further ideas, feel free to create a ticket on GitHub. We’d love your input!
Like how if an ER was run the way software is maintained, then, on a slow day, the doctor would order all the nurses to go in to the waiting room and bust everyone's knee caps.
Maybe the apps themselves are stable enough that the engineers working on them have to work on something. Is there an example of a SaaS product out there with more than one developer that isn’t interested in adding features? I don’t know of any.
I think the issue is if you do not keep adding features then some big tech company or larger startup will develop your feature in house and bleed your user base dry.
Imagine if you did one thing really well (like booking meetings). It would take Microsoft or google a year to copy the functionality into their own apps.
No one cares when money is cheap, but in a recession the first thing cut is going to be some single use SaaS app. For software that was sold with a license key it obviously isn’t as much of an issue, but the recurring revenue makes you beholden to continuously adding new features.
Totally agree. This reminds me of the Innovator's dilemma. The small company comes in, does one small thing really well, and then expands until it overthrows the large incumbent.
We as software developers don’t just get to sit back and blame the money people. We are incredibly incredibly incredibly guilty of piling on shitty features nobody wants because ‘we got that far down the backlog’, don’t want to move on to doing something else, and don’t know when to call it quits.
well, it's because they're separate groups is the problem. The money people don't pay the programmers to sit around and do nothing. so the programmers keep writing more code. if they could just say nope, it's finished, it's done, and step away, and keep getting the paycheck, they wouldn't have to find reasons to keep programming.
Grey area: Product managers/owners prioritize the backlog. Engineering has final say on what stories/issues they pull from that backlog based on their deeper knowledge of technical dependencies and similar phenomena.
There HAS to be a name for this phenomenon.
These are great products. But then they start adding feature over feature that add no or just little value while making the entire experience worse.
What is this? VC money feature creep?