While not letting PMs off the hook - I think “PM culture” is a cancer on the tech industry, and companies have ceded far too much influence to them overall - I think the issue is something else. The way I’ve described it is: the goal of many apps, services and sites now is to get you to spend as much time as possible in/on them, not to make you happy while doing so. They’ve learned that FOMO increases engagement. That the more time a user spends fumbling around for what they want, the more time they hold your attention. That user re-education means more time, more attention, more eyeballs.
We are in a world being rapidly destroyed by metrics. Any sense of intuitiveness or even humanity is considered worthless, because no PowerPoint-driven argument can be made in favor of it, while the metrics faction has reams of “data” to back then up. A thousand times a day we’re subjected to things we don’t want to experience, nobody wants to experience, but they make a metric somewhere go in the right direction. Shittier, harder to use software is just one facet of it.
We are in a world being rapidly destroyed by metrics. Any sense of intuitiveness or even humanity is considered worthless, because no PowerPoint-driven argument can be made in favor of it, while the metrics faction has reams of “data” to back then up. A thousand times a day we’re subjected to things we don’t want to experience, nobody wants to experience, but they make a metric somewhere go in the right direction. Shittier, harder to use software is just one facet of it.