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Comment by Schiendelman | Hacker News Reader

As a product manager, this makes me think the features you're building are not the things your customers need or want most. I'm curious if you were to ask your product manager about that six-month timeframe, and just ask the open-ended question of is there anything on the backlog that we can build that the product manager thinks users would pick up within days instead of months?

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As a product manager, this feels like they're in the pretty typical B2B SaaS trap of building the stuff that the people who pay for the product insist they need but the people using the product don't necessarily want, so they've gotta invest a bunch of time and effort getting usage/feedback.

Could be for good reasons (e.g. they're security features that are important to the business but add friction for the user) or just because management is disconnected from the reality of their employees. Either way, not necessarily the wrong decision by the PM - sometimes you've gotta build features fast because the buyer demands them in a certain timeframe in order to get the contract signed. Even if they never get used, the revenue still pays the bills.

If they were building the stuff the people paying for the product insist they need, it seems unlikely that they'd take 6 months to use it once built. Unless it's some API that takes a ton of work to build to. It didn't sound like they were getting feedback for those six months.

Security features that add friction for the user are usually forced, aren't they?

Contract requirements do make sense, but I get the idea that this user would know that.

What are you imagining that would be actual value but not used for six months?

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