The Hired Guns Blog

The French mathematician Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” What Pascal meant was that it’s very easy to put everything and anything into a letter, but it takes time to refine its contents with the reader’s interests in mind.

The same can be said about building great products; complicating a product is easy, but simplifying it is hard and takes time. “Feature creep,” the tendency to add features just to add features, and “cart-horsing,” (mapping out your marketing plan before you even know what your final product is going to look like—putting the cart before the horse, in other words), are caused by breaking two of the most important rules for developing projects:

• Understand what problem you are solving
• “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”—Albert Einstein

Research about customers, the market, and product usage (something you should always do) will help you understand what problem you are trying to solve. Without a problem to solve, it’s impossible to keep focused; you end up guessing, throwing every feature a customer has requested into your product, and wasting time and money on an overly complicated product that doesn’t actually solves real problems. Eventually you end up with something like The Homer, the ridiculous car-with-everything that Homer Simpson designed.

Knowing what the problems are—and tackling them one at a time—will allow you to come up with the simplest and quickest solutions. As product people, we need to beak things down into problems, and attack those problems by adhering to the two phases of a product’s life:

1. Creation
2. Optimization

Creation is Phase I; talk to customers, understand what they need (i.e. the problems you seek to solve) build quickly, test what you build, get feedback, and repeat this until you have something that solves the problems.

Optimization is Phase II; understand how you can make your product more efficient (e.g., are you losing customers because the signup process is five steps instead of one?, can you increase conversion if your signup button is red instead of green?, etc), and find the “leaks” (is your product missing one critical element?). Ultimately, this phase is about determining if it is necessary to spend time and money on creating new workflows or features. If it is, then you go need to go back to “creation” to come up with solutions and to test.

Optimization allows you to climb that hill that creation builds. SEO, conversion funnels, and the like are all important, but we need to understand their place in the process to get the most out of them. Having the simplest signup process doesn’t mean anything if what you are asking people to sign up for isn’t going to help them. Getting the product built and fleshed out, getting people to use it, and making sure that you have solved the problem must come first. Then, and only then, can you get the most out of optimization.

It’s very easy to make a product complicated, whether you work with digital or actual products. But being a great product person is about focus; it’s about taking the time to understand the problem you are trying to solve, creating the simplest product possible, and optimizing it to make it even more valuable and useful to both your user and your business.