Leo brown

Been thinking about this a lot lately. Every time we plan the next quarter, there s an internal debate: do we put our feature plans out in the open, or keep them internal until code actually hits production?

Do you think early-stage products need a public roadmap even a simple Trello board? Or does that only backfire the moment priorities shift and a promised feature gets delayed?

Should it live on a public page like Canny or Notion? Be sent out in monthly newsletters? Or is sharing upcoming plans just setting yourself up for unnecessary pressure?

In our case, we ve started realizing that being brutally honest about why something got delayed actually builds more trust than making shiny timeline promises.

We built an automated script to handle a tedious weekly task and thought we saved a ton of hours.

Instead tiny bugs started slipping through without any alerts.

Now the whole team has to go back and double-check every single piece of output by hand just to be safe.

I tried removing all text from our dashboard because we wanted that modern clutter free look.

But during user testing most people hovered over the same icon for ages or clicked the wrong thing entirely.

Adding just two words under each button completely fixed the problem and everyone breezed through the next test.

It made me realize how often we design for aesthetic screenshots instead of what users actually need. Have you run into this with your own apps?