On getting feedback from your users

Some time ago I talked with a co-worker about his internal project. He was the owner of a product that tried to provide a generalized, hardened and fully codified Jenkins instance. This was done with the help of mostly Puppet and Groovy code. I was in this project for six months to help build the product and learn something there.

After three years, one complete rewrite and countless hours put into the product, it was still not finished. The acceptance rate in the company for the product as well as the project was low.

There were several reasons why the product failed. Among these were unclear scope, feature creep and end-user complexity. But the reason we mainly talked about was missing feedback from the users of the product. The co-worker had no way to check how many users downloaded or used the product, apart from the people who developed it. The only feedback he got was when something did not work. But even this feedback was rather sparse. He claimed that this was the main reason the project failed.

I argued that receiving no direct feedback from most people is normal.

I maintain some rather small (fewer than 1000 stars) open-source repositories on Github. Checking the statistics on one of these projects I see about 9000 clones and 2000 views in the past week. Yet, there are only 70 issues and 132 pull requests (excluding mine) for the whole lifetime of the project. And that’s about for years.

So why is it like this?

My projects are certainly not so good as there are no issue or things to improve. However they must be somewhat good, otherwise they wouldn’t be downloaded. Still, I rarely get feedback.

Maybe it is because most users are just this: users of your product.