
If your product is great, it doesn't need to be good (2010) - gmays
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-your-product-is-great-it-doesnt-need.html
======
adrianmsmith
> Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right

I think the trouble with this advice is, when you’re developing a product,
isn’t not really clear which attributes are key. You have a hypothesis, but
you could easily be wrong.

Or perhaps this advice could be interpreted as: decide on your hypothesis, and
go all in on it, and only it. If you’re right, it’ll turn out well (as
discussed in the article) and if you’re wrong you would have failed anyway and
you probably fail quicker following this advice.

~~~
k__
_" isn’t not really clear which attributes are key"_

If that isn't clear, you're missing the "doing deliberate research" part of
such a venture.

~~~
ullify
Part of the reason Agile/XP/etc. exist is to argue against this line of
thought. Iteratively putting a working product in front of people is more
effective at getting you high quality information than millions of dollars of
upfront research.

~~~
pfraze
Agree but it's not really a dichotomy. From initial conception to final
release, you should be researching by iteration. Eventually that means user-
testing prototypes, then betas, then RCs.

~~~
k__
_" you should be researching by iteration"_

This!

Research doesn't just mean to read stuff.

------
duxup
It certainly fits the startup style concept where you expect the product to
take off or eventually "pulled" out from the company by customers. Customers
in those situations don't jump on board for a bazillion features (that
actually sounds like a headache) rather it is probably just for the core of
whatever the product is. If they're not interested in that... bazillion side
features won't get them either.

I was working on a ancillary product connected to my employer's main product a
while ago. It was barely done, missing a lot of features but they wanted to
ship it. I was all "ok but .."..... and the folks who wanted it ate it up. No
complaints about all the missing tidbits I was thinking of, not a peep. As far
as adoption went, it didn't matter. I probably could have spent a month or
more longer on that stuff, but it wasn't what was important to get started.

~~~
jrumbut
Going through that process a few times before, I learned about the importance
of understanding which among the many equally time consuming ways to build
something will give you the best tradeoffs as the product grows (or doesn't).

Should a record be updated or a new version inserted? Hard or soft deletes?
Creating a column for each setting or have a JSON blob?

No one answer is correct for every situation. You can be future proof, ready
to implement reporting/backup and restore/power user features when the time
comes, or setting yourself up for pain.

------
hnick
> Disclaimer: This advice probably only applies to consumer products (ones
> where the purchaser is also the user -- this includes some business
> products). For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of
> feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as
> possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability.

I hate it because it's true.

------
l0b0
This is a problem with almost all open source software: for all the talk of
doing one thing and doing it well, they almost all end up being kitchen sinks
in the end. The only major success story I can think of was when Mozilla was
forked and trimmed down to Firefox. Hopefully the same thing will happen to
Firefox, and we can get a browsing experience where the focus is the average
user experience, with easy ways to change it into an expert user interface.
And even more hopefully something similar happens to every desktop manager,
email client and shell tool out there. Make things extensible, then remove the
cruft. Continue until the core functionality is all that remains.

~~~
gear54rus
> with easy ways to change it into an expert user interface

Show me one product that could achieve this? Never have I ever seen something
that executes that particular step well.

So I vote against 'average user experience' aka dumbed down and locked down
crap.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
VSCode, Firefox, KDE, tilix, cmder, the latest version of blender...

~~~
gear54rus
I would agree with VSCode, seems ok in my book.

Firefox of the past maybe, when it allowed unsigned extensions. AFAIK now it
isn't possible in non-dev version.

Others I have not heard of/not used.

------
aytekin
What he means: If your product (first version) is Great (at a few important
things), it doesn't need to be Good (at everything)

I think the unstated “first version” part is important. You should be
gradually adding the missing parts. And not just leave it at the great, simple
but missing too many things state forever.

~~~
hnick
True but I think another important factor is that by avoiding the missing
parts, you might realise they're not really missing after all. What once
seemed essential actually isn't.

------
pier25
Previous discussion 10 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1111826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1111826)

~~~
deanCommie
No, you're mistaken that article is from 2010, that's oh...

------
niftich
This works sometimes. Like, the article notes, it worked for the iPod. For the
iPad, it landed much softer than its predecessors, even if they still made a
killing on sales.

The large format was awkward to hold as a content consumption device, and
while it could have made for a neat content creation device, that never became
a mass-market phenomenon. Later, smaller models were then eclipsed by phones
that grew in size. Then, recently, the line was repositioned to import some
more traditional computing expectations, after the Surface line proved that
there was demand for that paradigm.

If you squint, you'll notice that the iPad wasn't a failure, but the critiques
leveled against it at the time that challenged whether consumers would
recognize that an iPad was something they needed turned out to be right. Those
who waited and never bought an iPad were rewarded by phones that grew in size
until they could reliably satisfy much of the iPad's usecase. Those who used
the iPad for content creation found that software was a significant part of
their workflow, which translated poorly to competing platforms that later
emerged to innovate with hardware -- so their long-term retention was a blend
of lock-in and merit.

At first, the high price of the product initially contributed to a significant
self-selection of its customer base -- by dissuading unsure prospects from an
impulse buy; but this gatekeeping effect was lessened when smaller, cheaper
models were introduced later. Gmail achieved gating through invitations;
Facebook achieved gating through requiring an ".edu" email address. The iPad,
Gmail, and Facebook all benefited from the marketing value of gating, but in
the latter two's case, the network effect kicked in in earnest once the gating
was lifted. In the iPad's case, once less-invested people began buying iPads,
that now-shifting market of people began moving closer and closer to the
consensus that it's simply a Really Big iPhone, with all the benefits and
drawbacks that come with that.

I'd generalize that lesson to say that your product must appeal to a self-
selecting, highly-invested fan, so that it's profitable to solely cater to
them and ignore everyone else. Then, to survive an intentional or
unintentional pivot to a more mass-market appeal, your product must readily
offer a smooth and coherent way to satisfy a set of usability needs people
currently have. Gmail, Facebook, the iPod, and the iPhone did this, but the
iPad fell well short.

~~~
pfraze
These really good observations. One thing that made me appreciate the
_current_ ipad a little more is my recent experience with MS's Surface which
is an explicit tablet/desktop hybrid. There is a lot I like about what MS is
doing, and I recognize the hybrid model is extremely difficult to accomplish,
but their tablet experience just doesn't stack up to the ipad's. I felt
frequently frustrated by the lack of gestures which would help me quickly
navigate between applications, and (even worse) the click targets don't change
for the tablet mode, so pressing things with my finger is nearly impossible.
Watching youtube is like rocket surgery because of how the controls hide until
hover and remain very small. Even UIs which the OS could ostensibly alter,
like click targets for window controls, stay small and difficult to hit.

Microsoft is trying to hit two products at once, and (to a degree) the desktop
mode is still strong, but the tablet mode just isn't. It gives me more respect
for Apple's decisions than I previously had.

------
zuhayeer
> We took a similar approach when launching Gmail... The secondary and
> tertiary features were minimal or absent. There was no "rich text" composer.
> The original address book was implemented in two days and did almost nothing

Even today, Gmail doesn't do a lot of things that Outlook does like rendering
web fonts / inline calendaring, but I still vastly prefer Gmail (even with the
new clunky UI) over any other client

Also shoutout to Paul for envisioning the iPad as a quarantine savior in 2010
haha

------
redis_mlc
> back when 4MB quotas were the norm

Hotmail had a very low quota, somewhere in the 1 MB to 10 MB limit, so users
had to delete an email before sending a new email. lol.

That was the motivation for most users to switch, not "because gmail is fast,"
despite the humblebrag.

~~~
svantana
Exactly. Paul B gets a lot of credit for designing a nice AJAX product, but me
and most people switched from hotmail mainly because of the storage, and
partially because of google's cool aura at the time (remember "don't be
evil"?)

The search bar was nice but would have been pointless in hotmail where you
were forced to delete your old emails anyway.

------
amitport
Reminds me of something a colleague once told me (not sure if he was qouting
someone): "your product needs to be _the best_ , but that doesn't means it
needs to be good."

That is to say your success is relative to your competition (and sometimes all
solutions are "not good")

This advice seems to me like the parallel for enterprise products.

------
nicodjimenez
Good article and the disclaimer at the end is appreciated as well.

~~~
pmiller2
Yeah, I like to think of that as the "Salesforce clause." Salesforce is a very
powerful system, and can be bent to do just about anything. But, actual users
frequently hate it, and customization is involved enough that you need someone
who's an expert in doing it.

I consider myself lucky that I don't have to use very much software at work
that was chosen for me by a CTO, or, worse yet, a CFO, or other executive.

------
tmaly
Still spot on. I think this applies to software as well as physical products.

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raywu
Just read this, this week. Excited to see what others think.

------
rglover
Very well-timed and helpful, thank you.

------
sophieRu
I think a lot of companies have become features-hungry, gathering more and
more side-features and forgetting their core value.

~~~
pmiller2
Very true. Microsoft Word is a great example of this. It has a ton of
features. Nobody uses them all. Everybody uses a small fraction of them. The
problem is that my useful subset is probably not the same as your useful
subset.

And, this is about a piece of software that's fundamentally just about
producing documents for people to read. You know, text, and the occasional
picture or graph. Excel is worse: never become known as the person who "knows
Excel" in the office, unless you want people bugging you forever about it.

Why do so few software projects ever reach a state that's considered
"finished," anyway?

~~~
RNCTX
I remember years ago, when 4:3 CRT monitors were still prevalent, opening up
Word at work and turning on every optional menu plus the ridiculous paperclip
assistant just to make this joke in a snarky email (before there were snarky
Slack messages instead).

The resulting blank space left for actually typing something with every
feature enabled: zero.

~~~
pmiller2
That takes me back to the bad old days of browser toolbars. I remember seeing
someone's screen almost completely filled with them.

~~~
realityking
I hadn‘t though about them in ages but turns out, at least the Google Toolbar
is still around.
[https://www.google.com/intl/de/toolbar/ie/index.html](https://www.google.com/intl/de/toolbar/ie/index.html)

~~~
redis_mlc
If you have any old browser toolbars installed, remove them ASAP.

Often they were subcontracted out, even by name-brand companies, and the
result was a security bugfest. In particular, I'm thinking of one that starts
with Y.

