Lazy Engineers Make Lousy Products

Do you ever try to unsubscribe from an online newsletter?

For example, SBI Securities (Biggest online trading service in Japan) keeps sending me emails non-stop. I mean non-stop:

Although they have probably sent me more than 100 emails over the years, I haven't even opened a single one.

Isn't there a single soul in SBI's marketing team that has some common sense and stop this torture? At least stop sending emails to people that never open them.

Their practice looks pretty much like people shoving brocherues to everyone's post-boxes. Did you know that nowadays majority of apartments in Tokyo have auto-lock system to prevent this indiscriminate marketing torture?

I wish I could add an auto-lock to my inbox to stop these guys from abusing my mailbox.

Stop whining like a little boy. What's your point?

Well, I'd like to argue that most of the pain we encounter in our daily lives interacting with digital tools stem from either:

1. Business people developing products and not loving them
2. Projects with insufficient resources
3. Lazy engineers

Groups 1 and 2 are neither interesting nor our findings would be actionable, so I will skip talking about them and focus on Group 3.

Lazy engineers make lousy products

Do you ever have issues interacting with well-developed products like Iphone, Google Cloud Services, or Booking.com?

You probably don't. Why? Because these products are crafted with painstaking effort by people who love their creation (probably).

Most of the lousy products in our world are developed by people that do not care about their product, so the product is created with minimal effort possible, as long as people buy it.

Little effort does not lead to simple products though. They lead to an incoherent mess that pains people who use them.

Wait there is more...

Having a lousy marketing strategy like SBI is OK, if they let their users opt-out from this newletter easily.

Because that would be the fair thing to do right? If you don't have the tools to target the right customer with your newsletter/ nor track their engagement, at least give them the ability to stop accepting emails from you.

Luckily, there is a link in their email that lets you unsubscribe from this newsletter.

So what happens when you click on "Unsubsribe"?

As expected from a lousy product, they ask you to login to their service in order to change your notification preferences.

As a person who wants to cut comms with them, what is the probability that I will remember my credentials? Near zero.

As a web developer, I know for a fact that "unsubscribe" can be easily done without the need for logging in the user. This team of engineers either don't know what they are doing, or they are purposefully introducing barriers for people to stop receiving their notifications.

I don't know which one is the worse scenario.

To wrap up

So when you have problems interacting with a lousy product next time, do not blame yourself. Think of a business manager who only cares about financials, and does not love the product. Think of a lousy engineer who did not spend an additional hour to make it easy for you to use this product.

Because you should have an easier time using these tools. You are the king.

Bonus

To finish this article on a bright note, I wanted to highlight an episode I had a with a great company: Starbucks.

Although I rarely go to Starbucks, I used to be a member to their newsletter. Similar to SBI, they used to send me an update every once in a while (SBI sends every day though, which probably qualifies for abuse).

And I never opened their emails. At some point, they sent me an email saying that they did not observe any activity from me, so they'd remove me from the newsletter if I didn't react.

This was such a nice gesture, I went out of my way to actually engage with them to keep receiving this newletter.

Companies like Starbucks give me hope that there are still product people around us that care about & respect their users. I'm hopeful that such product-oriented companies will be more succesful in the long run as their customers will appreciate their efforts.

Do you have any similar episodes? Feel free to share below in comments.

Happy hacking!