The Unhealthy Fixation: Why I Obsess Over Operator Experience
Everyone talks about user experience. The experience that quietly decides whether a software business scales is the one nobody designs for, the operator's.
I have an unhealthy fixation on experience, for users, for customers, and most of all for the operators who actually run the business on top of the software we build. The first two get all the attention. The third is where companies quietly bleed out.
Operators are the support agents, the ops team, the finance analyst reconciling a report at 11pm, the implementation engineer onboarding a new client. They live inside the internal tools nobody bothered to design. And their experience compounds straight into your margins.
Why it gets ignored
Internal tools have no champion. They don't show up in a demo, they don't move a marketing metric, and the people who suffer from them rarely sit in the room where roadmap is decided. So friction accumulates: manual workarounds, spreadsheets bridging two systems, tribal knowledge that walks out the door when someone quits.
What changes when you care
- Support resolves issues in minutes instead of escalating to engineering.
- Onboarding a new customer stops requiring a heroic effort.
- Headcount scales sub-linearly with revenue, the whole point of software.
- Key-person risk drops because the process lives in the tool, not in someone's head.
Treat your operators as first-class users and the business gets cheaper to run as it grows. Ignore them and every new customer costs a little more than the last, until growth stops being worth having.