Feedback and Bias

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. Richard Feynman

Back in January 2014 we had this urge to scratch our own itch and create an email client that we could collaborate in. We had a clear vision for the product and made the decision early on to keep our head down and build Missive in a silo to speed up development and move faster.

From that perspective, we consider it a tremendous success – we’ve put together a product that we love and that now plays an integral role in our workflow.

Now that we’ve scratched our own itch, we’re ready to scratch yours.

After almost 18 months of continuous development, we’re excited to finally share our work with the world. We’re eager to learn about our private beta users’ habits and understand their problems to find out how Missive can help them.

We enter a tricky phase in the lifecycle of a product: introducing the feedback loop from early users. Too little of it, Missive will remain a tool for us, by us. Too much of it, we risk diluting our collaborative email client into a bland and bloated piece of software.

Confirmation bias happens when we filter reality through our biases, ignoring evidence that challenges or refutes what we believe and eagerly accepting evidence that confirms what we believe. Russ Roberts

If we want Missive to thrive as a business, this feedback phase is crucial. We need to be careful not to deceive ourselves into thinking we already know the road ahead. The hard part is not listening to our users, it’s doing it without the bias we might have from a year of working in a silo.

It’s time to listen, experiment, and adapt.

One more thing…