Jessica Flower

People rarely write down the real reason they left a product. If a tool feels slightly clunky or takes too many clicks to finish a basic task nobody bothers typing out a long paragraph about micro friction they just close the tab and never come back while the exit survey simply says "missing a feature.

" Watching actual screen recordings usually exposes the messy truth about where people get stuck. What unusual patterns or subtle roadblocks have you caught on recordings that users never mentioned in tickets?

It's weird having a decent number of active users while having zero clue what your typical customer actually looks like. Some people log in every single day for work while others signed up months ago and completely vanished. Trying to build features for a mixed crowd like that makes roadmaping really tough because you can't please everyone at once.

If you've been through this stage, at what point did you decide to narrow down your target market instead of trying to appeal to everyone?

Cleaning up technical debt feels satisfying until you realize that mysterious piece of ugly code was actually holding the whole feature together.

I used to delete anything I didn't immediately understand during a refactor thinking I was being efficient. Now I've learned the hard way that messy code doing vital work looks identical to code doing nothing at all if you don't check git blame first.

What's your current routine before you hit delete on a large block of legacy code?