Introducing Feature Request
Turning complaints and rants into something a bit more useful
A massive cultural adjustment for me when I joined Amazon way back when was the concept of a “Trouble Ticket.” Trouble tickets made the Amazon world go round, and they didn’t necessarily mean “trouble.”
If the site went down, there would be a Trouble Ticket (TT for short), but there would also be a TT if you needed access to a system or if you needed to schedule the delivery of a specialty shipment to your office. Most TTs were for things that internal teams wished were different about the internal systems we used; I almost certainly had a full dozen for adding new attributes to the catalog for TVs.
When I joined more “traditional” companies, they tended to use the generic term for those kinds of TTs: feature requests.
So what is a feature request, exactly?
A feature request is simply a wish for something to be different, usually about a piece of software of a larger system. Usually, they’re internal to a company though sometimes customers/users can submit them directly too. If you encounter something that doesn’t make sense or makes your life difficult, you submit a feature request to the team that owns the tool and hope they fix it.
Basically, they’re fancy complaints. Anywhere I work, I generate a ton of these.
What’s this newsletter about?
Work is going to be changing for me (more on that later) and I’ll need an outlet for those kinds of complaints that I’m always making in my head. I also happen to believe that they’re an excellent mechanism to learn why something may not work the way you want, which can help you better understand the world.
You’re almost never the only person with a complaint, and there are almost always reasons why reality disagrees. I’ll try to dive into those as well.
Complaints, Context, and Recommendations
Each edition will detail a feature request I’ve generated, usually but not always about a tech product. I’ll dive into why I think I’m not alone and why it hasn’t been fixed yet, and I’ll also provide some recommendations and larger lessons on the topic.
Basically, each time this newsletter hits your inbox you’ll learn about an inefficiency that you may also be encountering and get some ideas about how you might be able to help fix them.
I hope you’ll subscribe and share your thoughts so that I can produce the writing you want to read! And I also recommend starting your own newsletter; I’ve had a ton of fun with
over the last year and I'm excited to expand my topic and audience with Feature Request.