I almost hate Amazon's Kindle Online Management System. I put about a thousand personal documents into it and now I can't delete those documents simply because it is very user unfriendly.
But I like Chrome's feature. For example, when you close a tab mistakenly, you can quickly reopen it.
Those good, smaller features are usually created by engineers directly. If there is a very heavy PO procedure to just add one simple feature into the system, those small features will never have a chance to exist. So that in Amazon, nobody could take a look at the ugly delete operation. If they do, they need to go through maybe days of discussion before they can sit down and implement it.
I like the engineer-based development, and I truly believe this is the right way to have a product implemented. Also, I truly believe we should have the engineers, and the users sit closely together to share their thoughts, their feelings. If the engineers are themselves the users, that would be excellent. So there are two proved successful business mode: DevOps, and open source. With DevOps, the distance between the development engineers and the operations are very short. They sit together, they work together, so they feel together and share together. With open source, skillful customers can contribute to the software and make it better. Of course, there are other barriers such as business interest conflicts, etc.
With a customer facing system, I usually think that we should provide interface for the users to add things they want into the system. Most likely the users won't have the same level of programming skills as professional software engineers. But if the interface is simple enough, the language is simple enough, they can still contribute.
In this way, they help themselves. If they share the code with the software vendor, we can help them improve those implementation and make it standardized, then we can release those feature to other customer.
Can we call that as DevUse?
