[tnolet]

Even if you weed out the willy nilly stuff, you will bump into Enterprise users that are actually correct.

They will mention something you know you should have added but always wrote off as "bloat" or "not really really really needed". Those things start happening more and more the moment you are doing $100K plus deals.

[xnorswap]

Are you talking about structural fundamentals or product features?

Because I agree about the fundamentals, the things enterprises tend to care about:

- SSO / SAML / auth integrations

- ISO Certifications

- Regular Pen tests

- Localisation support

- APIs ( that they'll never use )

- Bulk operations

- Self-hosting ( or at least isolated / non-shared application cloud hosting )

Get these and similar right and it's the difference between landing enterprise or not.

But if you're talking about features specific to a product, or custom products for a platform, that's a very different thing, and that's where the great distraction can come in. That's where you'll end up developing features that go unused, and it's these which aren't so consistent across customers.

Imagine you make washing machines and get a request for:

" This Washing machine must have a pre-set button for a 57deg 38.5 minute wash. Without that, I couldn't consider this machine ".

You try to argue that you let users define their own pre-sets, and that they can set up their own pre-set for that cycle. But you're denied by the person in sales who insists that they need exactly that as a first-class button on the front of the machine.

That's the level of petty that some large customers will try. In some way, it can be seen as a good sign that they've engaged with your product, but sometimes you wonder if it's just a trial balloon for seeing if you'll put up with the unreasonable.

[timr]

You missed some universal ones that are both necessary, and a total pain:

- Teams & Fine-grained Permissions

- Audit logging

- SOC 2/3 compliance

- Data wiping / retention / data policy management

- Reporting

- Cookie law crap (GDPR & CCPA)

- Myriad forms of custom product tiers & billing arrangements

I'd put these above several of the items on your list, and in my mind, they fit into the category of "things a developer calls 'bloat', that are actually necessary for enterprise sales".

[pixl97]

>bump into Enterprise users

What a lot of these HN programmers seem to miss, is it's not about what you or your application provides. It's about what your competition is willing to provide. If you don't have much competition then that's great, but the moment your 100k-10m paying user starts testing the other software your C-levels and sales people are going to have the programmers locked out of the building the moment they say they won't write a feature.