Decouple Consumers from Their Issues

If you have users, you will always have a percentage of them who seem to have made it their life's mission to pester you. They are users who will never do things the “right way", provide the 80% of feedback you get while being less than 20% of your users. They are the users who will “escalate" every other issue rather than talking to you. Often, their complaints are trivial or simply incorrect.

As humans we start responding to them in predictable ways. First, we ignore them, and then we encourage our teams to dismiss them, often sharing anecdotes about how their issues are non-issues.

Barriers get built, buttons get pushed, no one is happy.

But what we forget, is how valuable having vocal users . At any startup event, you will find many companies still struggling to attract users, where we sit and whine about negative feedback.

Worse it does not help the product, you can't improve without feedback.

Separate the user and problem

The simplest solution is to receive all feedback and triage it based on the issue itself, not the user providing it. This method involves separating the user from the problem and assuming no malice on their part Not everyone is out to get you