It’s a thing.
If you are working with software, you see it all the time. But, like me, you can’t put a finger on it… what you are experiencing might just be as fleeting as a passing truck, child or whatever that’s just barely catching your attention.
But it’s there. I see it everyday: buttons not working (as intended), glitches in the interface, unexpected behavior. Even frozen browser windows – time to reload!
You are looking at software maturity.
I like to think of it as a scale – say 1-100: 1 is the program I did in my first class of coding (Turbo Pascal anyone??), 100 …perfect.
Each piece of software gets a score. Simple.
The best, most mature, one is Google Ads. No surprise, it built one of the most successful businesses today: Alphabet. Like, 90% of Google’s revenue (before the reorganization), right?
Let’s give them 90 – the cloud does take a bit of getting used to, lots of functionality. And of course continuous updates and (minor) improvements.
What you click is what you get: it just works. As intended.
On the other side, you have new software – like freeware (fine, because, you know, it’s free). Or products from startups (they didn’t have a whole lot of time & money just yet to perfect them – build it, ship it, iterate) as well as say integrations & new functionality from established brands.
You see the flaws mentioned above almost immediately. Stuff sometimes just breaks. That’s fine. People built it / still build it!
What’s not too great though is when functionality is sold to you and …then it breaks. Or better put – turns out it never worked in the first place.
Real story (slightly abbreviated):
Happened more than once to me…
- Rep: OOOOF COURSE we can do A!
- Us: Ok, great, let’s go.
- Me: A isn’t working. I tested it like an entire day, 10 different ways. Yes, I cleared my cache and restarted…
- Rep: Shoot! We found a little flaw, our team is on it NOW!
- Me a week later: Still broken.
- Client Success: We see what we can do.
- Me months later: Hi! I’m still here! Anything?
- Client Success: nope…
- Me: What can we do about that?
- Vendor: Right, well, you signed already. How about… nothing?
- Me: Huh, ok then. *sends email to legal*
Budget was 40k+, so we’re not taking peanuts, freemium or anything like that. In any case, that helped me understand that it’s indeed not me & not the users/our reps, it’s more often than not the software.
Examples – scores for Sep22:
- Hubspot: 83
- Asana: 79
- WordPress: 77
- Zapier: 76 (Some things might look basic, but they work)
- Facebook Ads: 74 (they came a long way!)
- Salesforce: 73 (super powerful but also quite convoluted – I’m taking “ease of use” into account here)
- Canva: 70
- Salesloft: 66
- LinkedIn Campaign Manager: 63 (2017 (!) called, it wants video!)
- Calendly: 60 (no CRM integration – also taking functionality into account to some extent!)
- 6sense: 57
- Leadfeeder: 54
- Reachdesk: 47 (climbing quickly – investing in your product is the …2nd best marketing!)
- Zoominfo: 45
- Zoom: 41 (surprisingly low)
- InsightSquared: 30
- Cyberpunk 2077: 15 (unplayable on some platforms it was released on. Just wow! Games are of course also Software 🙂