There was a child post of this which was deleted, but I thought was very on the mark.  (It was likely deleted because it said things about a certain BigCO internals that potentially weren&#x27;t public)<p>That being said, I&#x27;d like to independently re-echo the thrust of that post because I did feel the contribution was key:<p>There are often internal channels in large companies that the boots on the ground use to communicate with each other in a more informal fashion.  I&#x27;ve noticed across multiple companies that this is a FANTASTIC leading indicator for the success of a feature.  For however much flak engineers get for not being &quot;people persons&quot; or however you put it, or needing &quot;Designers&quot; to guide their customer facing work, I&#x27;ve seen significant correlation between popular sentiment and feature success.  Perhaps at the end of the day, enough of our outlook as &quot;consumers&quot; remains to properly instruct us despite whatever programmer bent we may have; or more pessimistically, our own sentiment on what we&#x27;re making subconsciously impacts our output in a meaningful way.<p>So to end this ramble briefly; I think we CAN tell, the powers that be just need to look in the right places, and listen well if they do.