> People with exceptionally bad social skills who actually use your product<p>> They’re the best. They don’t care about hurting your feelings and won’t sugarcoat when it comes to discussing their issues. They actually care about solving their problem and that’s why they’re speaking with you.<p>I would have agreed with this one before spending some time in product management.<p>The truth is that these "tough love" users are actually quite good at providing feedback about what <i>they</i> want you to work on, but it's a mistake to assume that they are representative of your customer base.<p>It's even worse when it comes to tech products, where many of the most angry and vocal die-hard users have very unique wants that might not represent your typical customer at all. For example, if you dive into HN comments for a product you might hear a lot of complaints about the lack of an API for customizations, lack of a CLI interface, lack of a client for some specific Linux distribution with <0.1% market share, or the fact that the website doesn't work with JavaScript disabled. The people demanding these features might be <i>very</i> vocal and will insert their opinion into every discussion of the product.<p>But if you allocate engineering time to solving these niche issues, you might discover that only a tiny fraction of your userbase actually cared about it in the first place. Even worse, you might discover that the people complaining still aren't happy because they thought up 3 additional complaints about the new features you rolled out and what it's missing for their specific use case.<p>This is why product management (good product management) is much harder than it looks from the outside: You need to learn the art of weighing feedback and gauging true customer interest, including potential customers who haven't signed up yet. This means toning down the demands of vocal minorities while also de-sugaring some of the feedback from otherwise reserved commenters.