Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
A sidebar that never opened by default hid a feature shipped to every customer
James Stanier's status report said the feature was live and enabled for all customers, and it was. Adoption was awful because the sidebar holding it stayed shut until a user thought to open it.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- A feature shipped and enabled for all customers showed awful adoption while the status report calling it live stayed accurate on its own terms.
- Walking common user journeys through the UI with the team turned up the cause: the sidebar holding the feature did not slide out by default, so users never saw it.
- The account does not name the product, the company, or the adoption figure it calls awful.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint A status field that records delivery without the default UI state cannot separate a feature users turned down from one they never reached, so the follow-up work gets pointed at demand.
- decision Every low-adoption review now has a cheaper first move available: walk the journey before commissioning research into why users do not want the thing.
- cost The build is already paid for by the time the gap shows up, and the only inexpensive part left is the session that finds it.
- precedent As the coordination layer thins out, nobody's job description includes noticing a closed sidebar, so the reachability check has to be written into the report template or it does not happen.
The users never got as far as deciding. A user opened the product, saw the screen they always see, and the sidebar that held the new thing stayed where it was. The feature was live on that account the entire time.
Two facts sat in the same review without anyone putting them side by side: the item was enabled for all customers, and almost nobody was using it [1]. "Shipped was, therefore, true. However, findable by users was not: barely anybody actually used it!" Stanier wrote [3]. The cause turned up when the team walked common user journeys through the UI and watched the sidebar stay closed [2].
A bad adoption number arrives looking like a verdict on the idea, and the meetings it books are about demand and positioning. Discoverability is the cheaper explanation, and the harder one to see from a dashboard.
Stanier's framing is about distance. As scope grows, more people sit between the leader and the code, and the work reaches them finished [4]. He writes that in some organisations the truth of a project survives the trip upward, and in others it is "filtered, or even stealthily laundered" [5], and he cites Jeff Bezos's observation that humans are not wired for truth-telling by default because our nature is to please others [6].
The layer that used to carry detail upward is thinner than it was: Stanier describes an industry refactoring middle management through layoffs and a flattening that minimises coordination and information passing [8]. His September article argued that AI has collapsed the overhead of being in the details, which is his answer to the same problem [7]. Either way, no one's job now includes noticing a sidebar, so the check has to live in the artefact.
So make it a field. Any status line that says shipped gets two more entries: the default state of the surface the feature lives on, and the number of actions a user who has never been told about it takes to reach it from the screen they land on. When nobody on the team can fill those in, call the item deployed.
The 2x2, if you want one for your own review: enabled for all customers on one axis, visible in the default view on the other. Not enabled and not visible is work in progress. Enabled and visible gives a real test of demand, whatever the number says. Not enabled but visible is a flag bug someone files inside a day. The expensive cell is enabled and not visible, because it reports as done while the adoption metric looks like rejection, and the team spends its next cycle arguing about the wrong thing. Stanier's team found theirs by walking the common journeys in the UI [2].
What to watch
- Whether the structural accountability Stanier promises lands as a template field teams must fill in, or as a leadership habit.
- An adoption figure for the same feature after the sidebar default changed, which would test whether discoverability was the whole problem.
- Whether product status templates in flattened orgs start recording the default UI state alongside the release flag.