There's a specific moment when you can feel a vendor starting to come apart. It's not usually dramatic. There's no announcement. You just start noticing things. A feature that worked stops working quite as well. Support response times stretch. The product gets slower, or the interface gets more confusing in ways that don't seem intentional, just like someone reorganized the kitchen and nothing's in the logical place anymore.
Often what's happening is exactly what you'd expect: the company's chasing a profit number and has decided the fastest route is internal. Cut the team that handles edge cases. Consolidate the support queue. Merge departments. Standardize everything so there are fewer variables to manage. Track everything obsessively so you can prove you're being efficient. It's all very logical if you're sitting in a room looking at a spreadsheet and never actually talk to anyone using the product.
The thing about this approach is that it treats customers like a fixed variable. Like they'll just keep showing up, keep using the thing, keep paying for it, while the vendor optimizes internally. The logic goes: we need to hit this profit target, and the costs we can actually control are internal. So let's control those harder. And maybe that works for a few quarters. Numbers go up. Targets get met. Everyone involved in those internal decisions feels competent.
But here's what's actually happening in the meantime. Someone's workflow that used to take ten minutes now takes fifteen because a team got consolidated and the handoff process is now byzantine. A customer calls support and gets transferred three times because the reorganization shuffled who owns what. A bug that's been reported seven times doesn't get fixed because the person who could fix it got reassigned to prove that technical headcount could be reduced. The product gets incrementally worse at doing the thing it was hired to do.
Vendors sometimes act like customers exist in a vacuum, like they have nothing else they could do, nowhere else they could go. They don't. Someone's using your product because it solves a problem. If it starts solving that problem worse, and the person making the decision is someone who's never had to use your product to make their job work, then the incentives are completely misaligned.
The part that's particularly unforgiving is that by the time the damage shows up in customer retention metrics or churn, it's often too late to fix quickly. You can't rebuild a support team in a quarter. You can't get back the trust of customers who got frustrated and moved to something else. You can't un-reorganize something that was working fine just because it looked inefficient on a chart.
The vendors that don't fall into this trap usually have something anchoring them: someone in a position of real power who actually uses the product, or a culture that treats customer feedback like actual data rather than anecdotes, or enough slack in the system that they're not constantly choosing between hitting a number and maintaining quality. They optimize internally, sure, but they do it with the constraint that the product experience can't degrade. That constraint is expensive. It's why they stay expensive. It's also why people keep using them.
Optimizing for internal efficiency while ignoring what happens at the other end of the pipe isn't efficiency. It's just moving the problem around.