I had a conversation last Tuesday with the COO of a regional operator out of Knoxville. She runs about 14,000 units. I asked her, point blank, what she actually wants from her software stack. Not what the vendor pitch deck says she wants. What she wants.
She said three things, very fast, like she had been waiting for someone to ask.
One. She wants to open her laptop at 7 AM and see, on one screen, every problem at every property that needs her attention today. Not yesterday's report. Not a stale dashboard. Today. Right now. Sorted by how mad she should be about each thing.
Two. She wants her on site teams to spend less time in software, not more. She has been sold a lot of products that promise to make her teams more efficient and then those products require 40 minutes a day of data entry per property manager. The math on this is bad for her and she knows it.
Three. She wants to stop being asked to switch tools. Every six to nine months some vendor calls her and pitches a thing that is supposedly better than what she has. She doesn't want better. She wants done. She wants the work to be done.
I wrote those three things down in my notebook and underlined the third one. I think about it a lot.
The disconnect
Software people, including me, tend to think operators want features. We pitch features. We A/B test feature copy. We build feature trees. And operators, the good ones, do not care about features. They care about outcomes and they care about not having to think about the software.
The best feedback we ever got from a customer was, "I forgot we use you. That's a compliment." That's literally how she said it. I keep that text from her in a folder on my desktop called "moats."
What this means for how we build
It means we cut features more than we ship them. It means our roadmap is mostly subtraction. It means when a sales prospect asks if we do a thing, the answer is sometimes "we don't, on purpose."
This is hard to do at a Series B company because you have a bigger team and the bigger team produces more stuff. We have an entire ritual now where every feature that's been in production for 6 months gets evaluated for usage. If less than about 15 percent of customers use it weekly, we have a conversation about cutting it. We've actually cut three features in the last year. Customers did not complain.
I don't think this is some genius product philosophy. I think it's the obvious thing to do if you actually listen to the woman in Knoxville.