Supposedly airlines could make the economy seats much better than they are without a significant investment but purposefully do not in order to encourage people that can afford business or first class to choose business or first class. Perversely, this makes sense. If economy is only slightly worse than business then I’d be willing to save quite a bit of money by choosing economy for a worse experience. Yet if the economy seats were significantly worse then I’d pay a premium for business. The art is in figuring out what that threshold should be to fill every seat.

I have recently been using the premium LinkedIn recruiter account and it feels the same way. It’s orders of magnitude better than recruiter lite and anyone that spends multiple hours a day sourcing would have to get the premium account to benefit. It’s a savvy move by LinkedIn but at the same time disappointing how much better the actual product can be. Before using the premium version I attributed the poor usability to the product to poor execution but after seeing how effective the premium version is I know the team is incredibly competent and it’s terrible for business reasons.