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March 6, 2017

Broad Influence & Narrow Focus

Influence for the next great app can come from anywhere. A personal problem, a beautiful building, a painting, or even a song can be the inspiration for crafting a great user experience. As with anything new to the world there will be a period of rapid growth. Newly discovered use-cases will shape the future of the user experience and old conventions may fall to the wayside. During this period focus is essential, trying to do too much too soon means that effort is spread way too thin.

Developing new software products is a constant battle between including a new feature that could be really useful or leaving it until later. The worry before adding a feature is always that your product is incomplete without it and no one will sign up without it. The worry after adding a feature is that it’s not good enough and that people will abandon your product if you remove it.

The good news is that it is much easier to add a feature than to remove one, so leaving something until later is the right call 90% of the time. The bad news is that it never feels that way at the time. 

Staying focused on the features that you already have gives your team a chance to make them the best they can be, once you get a critical mass of happy (paying) users you can always go back and implement your backlog.