Ask HN: How do you prioritize non-essentials at your company?
New features: whether internally driven or customer-driven, research and development to add business and user value to the product, often resulting in MVPs
Iteration: Going back to those MVPs, sorting through what was cut, getting customer feedback, and improving those features so they’re well-rounded and more-or-less feature complete (for the time being)
Quality of life: General UX improvements, improving workflows, shortcuts, power user features, visual polish
Delight: Illustrations, animations, Easter eggs. Quality of life or well-developed features can be delightful too, of course
Bug fixes: Fixing things that become broken or not working right or are revealed to have always been so. Bug fixes also occur during new features and iteration
My company is relentlessly focused on new features and has been making more and more of an effort at iteration.
Bug fixes tend to only occur when something actively blocks a user from doing a core activity in the app or when a sales or customer success person complains that it's messing up their demos.
As a designer, my pet project is quality of life, and with some very rudimentary coding skills, I do as much as I can to advance this area by opening my own PRs, but I know so much more could be done with a few actual engineers in tow.
Delight as defined above is something I'm less passionate about, but I know how powerful it can be.
Around the office, I regularly hear exclamations of joy as my colleagues discover useful tricks, Easter eggs, or thoughtful anticipation of user need as they use other companies' products to do their work. But that kind of thing so rarely gets prioritized in our own product.
I'm curious how non-essentials get prioritized at other companies (and I know they do, I see them all the time) and what strategies people might suggest in advocating for them.