I had to introduce and present to my colleagues the idea of creating products clients love. We as a company were creating many tools and features and almost every idea turned to be developed either as a new product or a future in one of the existing products. We were delivering like crazy and we thought that this would bring value to the users but they continued to ignore us. At some point we noticed that it was hard to convince people to use our products. We ended up with so many functionalities to look after that we couldn’t decide where to put our efforts next. And on top of that stakeholders were coming up with many new ideas.
We needed to focus and stop loosing precious resources! After quick discussion on the issues with one of our engineering team leaders, I have decided to work on introducing the idea of simplicity and eventually trimming the unnecessary fats. This brought me into looking at the best practices and what the bright guys in the product development have to say.
Keeping it simple
Experts constantly explain that the products should be kept simple. Their main points are:
- Progress is not equal to Features;
- Keep it simple and actionable;
- Keep simplicity over time and stay true to your core;
- One Feature In, one feature Out – Make on subtraction for every addition;
- Less is more;
- What did you undesign?;
- Even if costs are negligible (and sometimes they’re not), ineffective products divert focus and resources from core and growth products, and ultimately dilute the overall value proposition of the business.
After taking a deeper look back into what we had built over time and the mentioned points, several things caught my attention.
- We need to decide whether to stay true to our customers or to our company;
- Requests and priorities become hostage of power users (small number of users who use the product most);
- Lack of focus on opportunities to engage the customers you have yet to reach;
- We have accumulated debt which has to be paid! – Technical, Product and Support Debt;
- The above lead to low morale;
- We were affected by sunk cost fallacy and biases – it is hard to let go of something you have invested money and efforts in.
We need to focus on simplicity and staying true to our core functionalities and products.
Prevention! – Don’t build stuff people don’t need
One of the obvious ways to keep our products simple is not to build features and products which people don’t need. This can be achieved by following two major principles:
1. You should discover your clients’ needs – talk with them and make sure that the product or feature you are planning to build will be bought and used by them.
2. You should talk with your engineers about feasibility – make sure that they can build it.
Focusing on simplicity and having those two points in action brings up the chances of creating products which clients will love.
Read more:
Startup Metrics for Pirates / KILL a Feature (FOWA London, Oct 2009) – Dave McClure
https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-fowa-london-oct-2009/17-KILL_A_FEATURE_Something_Sucks
What did you undesign? – Elon Musk
https://twitter.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1203840982497792005
Scot Belsky, The messy middle, 2018
Marc Abraham, My Product Management Toolkit, 2018
Marty Cagan, Inspired, 2018
