> That’s it. “Read 3 files.” Which files? Doesn’t matter. “Searched for 1 pattern.” What pattern? Who cares.

Product manager here. Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences.

It's something that as an industry we should be over by now.

It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to make this mistake. It is _really easy_ to think you are making improvements by hiding information if you do not understand why that information is perceived as valuable. Many people have been taught that streamlining and removal is positive. It's even easier if you have non-expert users getting attention. All of us here at HN will have seen UIs where this has occurred.

Product management might be the worst meme in the industry. Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users, then let them allocate engineering resources and gate what ships. What could go wrong?

It should be a fad gone by at this point, but people never learn. Here's what to do instead: Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month. Just saved you thousands or millions in salaries, and you have a better chance of making things that your users actually want.

Product managers are fooling themselves if they think they can "improve the user experience" for developers -- developers can't agree on the simplest things such as key bindings (vim, emacs) or identation (tabs, spaces).

Make the application configurable. Developers like to tinker with their tools.

Every single website on the internet just says "whoopsie doodle, me made an oopsie" instead of just telling me what the problem is. This so-called mistake is so widespread that it has been the standard for at least a decade.

I agree it's a mistake, but I don't believe that it's viewed that way by anyone making the decision to do it.

> under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism

I think we can be more charitable. Don't you see, even here on HN, people constantly asking for software that is less bloated, that does fewer things but does them better, that code is cost, and every piece of complexity is something that needs to be maintained?

As features keep getting added, it is necessary to revisit where the UX is "too much" and so things need to be hidden, e.g. menu commands need to be grouped in a submenu, what was toolbar functionality now belongs in a dialog, reporting needs to be limited to a verbose mode, etc.

Obviously product teams get it wrong sometimes, users complain, and if enough users complain, then it's brought back, or a toggle to enable it.

There's nothing to be cynical about, and it's not something we "should be over by now." It's just humans doing their best to strike the balance between a UX that provides enough information to be useful without so much information that it overwhelms and distracts. Obviously any single instance isn't usually enough to overwhelm and distract, but in aggregate they do, so PM's and designers try to be vigilant to simplify wherever possible. But they're only human, sometimes they'll get it wrong (like maybe here), and then they fix it.

This also shifts over time - new users, especially people sophisticated in the field your tool is addressing, need to be convinced the product is doing what they believe it should be doing, and want to see more output from it. They may become comfortable with the product over time and move further up the trust/abstraction ladder, but at the beginning, verbose output is a trust-building mechanism.

We are currently extremely blessed on the companies new product, because they have placed a curious and open-minded product manager and a curious and open-minded ux-designer in charge of the administrative interface. Over half a year, those two have gained the trust of several admins within the company, all of them with experience of more than 10 years.

We have by now taught them about good information density.

Like, the permission pages, if you look at them just once, kinda look like bad 90s UIs. They throw a crapton of information at you.

But they contain a lot of smart things you only realize when actually using it from an admin perspective. Easy comparison of group permissions by keeping sorting orders and colors stable, so you can toggle between groups and just visually match what's different, because colors change. Highlights of edge cases here and there. SSO information around there as well. Loads of frontloaded necessary info with optional information behind various places.

You can move seriously fast in that interface once you understand it.

Parts of the company hate it for not being user friendly. I just got a mail that a customer admin was able to setup SSO in 15 minutes and debug 2 mapping issues in another 10 and now they are production ready.

> Many people have been taught that streamlining and removal is positive.

Over the past ten years or so the increasing de-featuring of software under the guise of 'simplification' has become a critical issue for power users. For any GUI apps which have a mixed base of consumer and power users, I mostly don't update them anymore because they're as likely to get net worse vs better.

It's weird that companies like MSFT seem puzzled why so many users refuse to update Windows or Office to major new feature versions.

Well, some who start as developers don't truly see users as stakeholders, sometimes not even remotely, and they often aren't assisted to change that view. While it feels astonishing in direct encounters, on the sliding scale of "are you a person that sees other people as stakeholders in general", many developers can be close to the "no" end of that scale. So not necessarily an institutional view.

I think it might also come down to UI churn. Sprint over? What to do next? Everything is always moving because people have nothing meaningful to do.

> Cynically, this is classic product management: simplify and remove useful information under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or perhaps minimalism if you're more overt about your influences.

Cynically, it's a vibe coded mess and the "programmers" at Anthropic can't figure out how to put it back.

More cynically, Anthropic management is trying to hide anything that people could map to token count (aka money) so that they can start jiggling the usage numbers to extract more money from us.

I am so glad to hear there are working PMs who are aware of this (and if you’re hiring it makes me more interested in considering your employer).

Or is this PM and executive management aiming for the no and low code users? That would fit the zeitgeist especially in the tech C level and their sales pitch to non-tech C levels.

Product management --and managers-- can be, shall we say, interesting.

I was recently involved with a company that wanted us to develop a product that would be disruptive enough to enter an established market, make waves and shock it.

We did just that. We ran a deep survey of all competing products, bought a bunch of them, studied absolutely everything about them, how they were used and their users. Armed with that information, we produced a set of specifications and user experience requirements that far exceeded anything in the market.

We got green-lit to deliver a set of prototypes to present at a trade show. We did that.

The prototypes were presented and they truly blew everyone away. Blogs, vlogs, users, everyone absolutely loved what we created and the sense was that this was a winning product.

And then came reality. Neither the product manager nor the CTO (and we could add the CEO and CFO to the list) had enough understanding and experience in the domain to take the prototypes to market. It would easily have required a year or two of learning before they could function in that domain.

What did they do? They dumbed down the product specification to force it into what they understood and what engineering building blocks they already had. Square peg solidly and violently pounded into a round hole.

The outcome? Oh, they built a product alright. They sure did. And it flopped, horribly flopped, as soon as it was introduced and made available. Nobody wanted it. It was not competitive. It offered nothing disruptive. It was a bad clone of everything already occupying space in that ecosystem. Game over.

The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc.

When someone says something like "I am not sure that's a good idea for a startup. There's competition." My first though is: Never assume that competitors know what they are doing, are capable and always make the right decisions without making mistakes. You don't always need a better product, you need better execution.

Also product manager here.

Not at all cynically, this is classic product management - simplify by removing information that is useful to some users but not others.

We shouldn't be over it by now. It's good to think carefully about how you're using space in your UI and what you're presenting to the user.

You're saying it's bad because they removed useful information, but then why isn't Anthropic's suggestion of using verbose mode a good solution? Presumably the answer is because in addition to containing useful information, it also clutters the UI with a bunch of information the user doesn't want.

Same thing's true here - there are people who want to see the level of detail that the author wants and others for whom it's not useful and just takes up space.

> It requires deep understanding of customer usage in order not to make this mistake.

It requires deep understanding of customer usage to know whether it's a mistake at all, though. Anthropic has a lot deeper understanding of the usage of Claude Code than you or I or the author. I can't say for sure that they're using that information well, but since you're a PM I have to imagine that there's been some time when you made a decision that some subset of users didn't like but was right for the product, because you had a better understanding of the full scope of usage by your entire userbase than they did. Why not at least entertain the idea that the same thing is true here?

[dead]

Product managers aren’t needed anymore.