I was reading yet another great post by Paul Buchheit, this one entitled If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good. He talks about the right approach to new products, suggesting that we “Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else”. This reminded me of my own guideline to new products, a guideline I call the 80-80 principle.
The tendency for the first version of a product is to pack it full of features, to try and make everyone happy, to go through that list of requested features and try and put in everything that your top customers asked for, often focusing on the features and not the goals. More often than not you end up with bloatware or a product that’s too complicated or just not fun to use. That’s where the 80-80 principle comes in. What it means is that you should try and develop something that addresses 80% of the problems for 80% of your users. Doesn’t that contradict my frustration about good enough not cutting it? Not really. Like Paul says, if you focus on a smaller subset of features, you are going to do a better job of implementing them. If you start simple, and iterate on that, you will need to do less to make changes that might if required if your initial assumptions were wrong, and you have a solid foundation which you can build upon.
The 80-80 principle
I was reading yet another great post by Paul Buchheit, this one entitled If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good. He talks about the right approach to new products, suggesting that we “Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else”. This reminded me of my own guideline to new products, a guideline I call the 80-80 principle.
The tendency for the first version of a product is to pack it full of features, to try and make everyone happy, to go through that list of requested features and try and put in everything that your top customers asked for, often focusing on the features and not the goals. More often than not you end up with bloatware or a product that’s too complicated or just not fun to use. That’s where the 80-80 principle comes in. What it means is that you should try and develop something that addresses 80% of the problems for 80% of your users. Doesn’t that contradict my frustration about good enough not cutting it? Not really. Like Paul says, if you focus on a smaller subset of features, you are going to do a better job of implementing them. If you start simple, and iterate on that, you will need to do less to make changes that might if required if your initial assumptions were wrong, and you have a solid foundation which you can build upon.
Which only makes me wish Kathy Sierra still blogged