The Customer
Complaints
Manifesto

Every team says it listens to customers. In practice that usually means support keeps a queue, sales keeps a spreadsheet, and research keeps a folder nobody opens after the readout. The listening is genuine. The remembering is not — and a company that cannot remember what it was told will keep solving the same problem twice.

The word we would like to retire is “complaint”. A complaint is a line item waiting for a verdict, and it quietly turns a conversation into a queue of small yes-or-no decisions. What a customer actually hands you is context: the job they were doing, the workaround they built, and the moment it stopped being worth the trouble.

This is not a new argument. Long before software had roadmaps, the people who ran service desks insisted on calling their callers “guests” rather than “accounts”, because the noun you choose decides how the work feels. Call something a ticket and you will close it. Call it a signal and you will go looking for the rest of the pattern.

So we took “complaints” out of our vocabulary, and then out of the product. There are as many good ways to build a company as there are companies, but a handful of habits hold up everywhere. These are the fifteen we keep returning to — the advice we would give a team on day one and still give ourselves on day nine hundred.