Always prioritize user value over perfection
Throughout my startup journey, I have been involved with numerous product decisions where I, along with the rest of the team, strove to be technically correct.
I’m talking about super specific situations involving things like:
- How to calculate “daily” metrics when daylight savings time makes some days have 23 or 25 hours (should such days show unfairly “worse” or “better” numbers?)
- How many days back to aggregate data when the timeframe is set to “in the past month” (options I’ve seen used include 30, 31, the number of days in the current month, and my craziest find: 30.5) (and also: does this timeframe include today-so-far?)
- How to organize the navigation when certain pages logically belong in multiple places (how do we pick one, and what do we do about all the people looking in the “wrong” but arguably “right” place?)
- Whether to include unsubscribed people in a custom-defined segment used for emailing subscribers (do we automatically remove the unsubscribed users even though the segment does not specifically state the users must be subscribed? does the answer change if we consider that segments are often but not always used for sending emails?)