Product Features & Requirements
Measured by the number of its features
A grossly obese set of requirements
Requirements proliferation
Features and complexity
It's not the features that matter
I'm sorry, I love engineers
Content as value
Intramural brownie points
We optimize what we measure
Chestertonâs Fence
When users never use the features they asked for
Minimum Awesome Product
An Article by Carlos BeneytoUsers are accustomed to a minimum of quality, and they expect that of all new products.
If our product does not [meet basic expectations of quality], people will automatically believe that it is a bad product and they will not take it seriously. It is not what they expect.
Hence my suggestion that the MVP has died and the MAP: Minimum Awesome Product was born.
Time-based analytics
An Article by Ryan SingerAnalytics apps don't tell you much about usage behavior. You might be able to see how many users performed an event, or how many times they did it. But none of the analytics packages out there are good at showing you how often people do things. Are they using to-dos once a week? Every day? Only signing into the app once a month but happily paying for years?
Time matters. You can't understand usage without time.
What happens to user experience in a minimum viable product?
An Article by Ryan Singer"Feature complexity is like surface area and quality of execution is like height. I want a base level of quality execution across all features. Whenever I commit to building or expanding a feature, I'm committing to a baseline of effort on the user experience."
Thereâs a distinction to make: The set of features you choose to build is one thing. The level you choose to execute at is another. You can decide whether or not to include a feature like âreset passwordâ. But if you decide to do it, you should live up to a basic standard of execution on the experience side.
Features can be different sizes with more or less complexity, but quality of experience should be constant across all features. That constant quality of experience is what gives your customers trust. It demonstrates to them that whatever you build, you build well.
August short No. 2: Glass
An Article by Riccardo MoriGlass looks and feels perfectly tailored to my photo sharing needs and expectations. For me itâs even better than pre-Facebook Instagram in the sense that it pushes me to select and share what I think are good photos (same as it happens with Flickr), rather than making me obsess with getting âthe Instagram shotâ at all costs every day or multiple times in a day. It doesnât cheapen photography like Instagram has done for years.
Thatâs why I hope Glassâs founders/developers will resist feature creep. Resist user objections like: I donât think Glass is offering that much for the subscription price theyâre asking. There are a lot of people who will gladly pay for having a cleaner, simpler, focused experience.
Feature parity
An ArticleWhilst Feature Parity often sounds like a reasonable proposition, we have learnt the hard way that people greatly underestimate the effort required, and thus misjudge the choice between this and the other alternatives. For example even just defining the 'as is' scope can be a huge effort, especially for legacy systems that have become core to the business.
Most legacy systems have 'bloated' over time, with many features unused by users (50% according to a 2014 Standish Group report) as new features have been added without the old ones being removed. Workarounds for past bugs and limitations have become 'must have' requirements for current business processes, with the way users work defined as much by the limitations of legacy as anything else. Rebuilding these features is not only waste it also represents a missed opportunity to build what is actually needed today. These systems were often defined 10 or 20 years ago within the constraints of previous generations of technology, it very rarely makes sense to replicate them 'as is'.
Software that nobody wants
An Article by Gandalf HudlowFinding value is the result of enabling individual and group-level discovery attempts. It's not the result of everyone following one leader's gut.
What just happened is a new software product/feature was created that no customer wanted. This happens way too often. In fact, most hyper important software projects that must be done by date certain or else, have deep flaws that cause some variation of this phenomenon, flaws that include:
- Not wanted - Company specified a solution to a problem that customers don't actually have
- No Rarity - Company is pursuing an iKnockoff of existing products. The market already has two scaled competitors with working solutions, customers naturally spend budget on products that are already successful to avoid risk
- Incorrect Packaging - Customers need a website, but the company created an iOS app instead
- Incorrect Pricing - Customers need SaaS pricing, but the company created a shrink wrapped, on-premise solution with CapEx and maintenance agreements instead
Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving
AÂ Research PaperHow would you change this structure so that you could put a masonry brick on top of it without crushing the figurine, bearing in mind that each block added costs 10 cents? If you are like most participants in a study reported by Adams et al. in Nature, you would add pillars to better support the roof. But a simpler (and cheaper) solution would be to remove the existing pillar, and let the roof simply rest on the base.
A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient.
Not Just a New Feature; a New Compact
AÂ Fragment by Jorge ArangoMy sense is that Slackâs teams think of themselves as adding âfeaturesâ to a âproduct,â instead of as stewards of a place where people work.
Understanding the Kano Model
An Article by Jared SpoolThe horizontal axis represents the investment the organization makes. As investment increases, the organization spends more resources on improving the quality (remember, Noriaka was a quality guy at heart) or adding new capabilities.
The vertical dimension represents the satisfaction of the user, moving from an extreme negative of frustration to an extreme positive of delight. (Neutral satisfaction being neither frustrated nor delighted is in the middle of the axis.)
Itâs against the backdrop of these two axes that we see how the Kano Model works. It shows us there are three forces at work, which we can use to predict our usersâ satisfaction with the investment we make.
Doing It Right
An Article by Brad FrostDoing it right requires a different pace of working and a much broader thought process than âok, letâs get this thing out the door.â Which is super tough because most workplaces place a huge emphasis on getting things out the door, and fast. Little agile tickets that are expected to be completed in micro sprints to me seem to be antithetical to doing it right.
The Web is Industrialized and I Helped Industrialize It
An Article by Dave RupertIn our cultural obsession with billionaire entrepreneurs we laud new features more than the maintenance and incrementalism work of making old features better and more accessible. Maintenance looks like red minus signs in the spreadsheet. New features look like green plus signs. New features look better on our LinkedIn profiles. New features have that pizzazz, baby.
When gardening, the building of planters and initial planting is a very short process. The majority of your time is spent nurturing and monitoring growth. I personally feel the struggle between maintainer work and new shiny feature work. I enjoy that new feature smell but I know that my day-to-day is more like a janitor on a boat mopping up someone elseâs barf. In terms of metaphors, the gardening metaphor is certainly better, and it acknowledges that design and development still tend to be more creative endeavors.
Yagni
AÂ Definition by Martin FowlerYagni originally is an acronym that stands for "You Aren't Gonna Need It". It is a mantra from Extreme Programming that's often used generally in agile software teams. It's a statement that some capability we presume our software needs in the future should not be built now because "you aren't gonna need it".
Product vs. Feature Teams
An Article by Marty CaganThis article is certain to upset many people.
Gods of the Word
Imagine that we had no voice and no tongue
Socrates: Imagine that we have no voice and no tongue, but want to communicate with one another. Wouldnât we like the deaf and the dumb make signs with the hands and the head and the rest of the body?
Hermogenes: There would be no choice, Socrates.
Socrates: We would imitate the nature of the thing: lifting the hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness. Heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop toward the ground...
Hermogenes: I donât see that we could do anything else.
Socrates: And when we want to express ourselves with the voice or tongue or mouth, the expression is simply their imitation of what we want to express?
Hermogenes: I think, it must be so.My name
âI am the utterance of my name.â
â Thunder, Perfect Mind, The Nag Hammadi Library
Reference and Is-ness
There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call âinherent meaningâ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is âIs-nessâ meaning. Inherent meaning is a wordâs identity, and reference merely its resumĂ©, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. âIs-nessâ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing â the word â appear to be many things â its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word.
It flows out and fills
This deeper meaning of a word isnât confined to what we think of as a dictionary definition. Rather it flows out and fills all the space available to it. Although a basic sense does affect the dynamics of a word, it has no power over its essence. Like the captain of a ship, it can control the crewâs actions, but not their minds. Each word has an aspect of meaning which lies deeper than any of its senses, and it is fundamentally on this meaning that all the senses depend.
No less than a Zeus
I too am a true believer in the autonomy of the archetype. A
/t/
or an/h/
is no less than a Zeus. The consonants are not essentially physical, but they live, evolve and influence human affairs. We overlook something essential if we deny that they can get up and walk around. This is not to say that their existence is independent of the human psyche. But then everything depends on everything.Like a prism
When you look at phonemes, you look through the perspective of morphemes, which are one linguistic level higher. The higher level is like a prism that splits the light in two. What was one thing, like âlengthâ at the phoneme level, looks like two opposite things âlongâ and âshortâ from the perspective of the morphemes. In practice, when you find both a word and its opposite, then the phoneme is not about either of these two things, but about what is common to them.
Fracturing
If we step back and view from afar this process of One-ness and Is-ness to fracturing and interpretation â of inherent meaning to reference, it follows that what lies at the foundation of language is simply what it is â sound â free of reference and interpretation. What makes what we know as language from its sound is fracturing and interpretation or using a word for a function other than what it simply is.
To evolve the language itself
So in the process of talking, we might say we are putting words in slightly new contexts, and then testing them against our peers to see if our experiment in juxtaposition had âmeaning. If we succeed, we have introduced new contexts for the words we use. These contexts will be taken up by our listeners, and will gradually become clearly enough defined to be thought of as referents. Once our words gain new referents, they start affecting the underlying phonosemantic structure of the language, the clustering patterns, the network of semantic relations. That is, the purpose of talking in the long run is to evolve the language itself.
Scooting over
There is at this point no evidence that acquired characteristics can be inherited. It is held that all changes to a genome are random, and cannot be subject to any higher principle. However, when a word is used in a new context, as it is whenever we say something new, a new sense is permitted. This does affect the phonosemantic structure, the linguistic DNA. Words in the vicinity of this word âscoot overâ to make room and allow themselves to be influenced by its philosophy. The language itself is now different.
The element becomes a sign
Each unit can be seen purely as form, as what it is. Or it can be viewed as having a function. Its function is only understandable within the next higher level of organization. And in every case, function must succumb to the constraints of form. Once this worldly function is assigned, the element becomes a âsignâ. It falls into the realm of concept. There is a mapping from one thought system to another.
The demand of a new word
Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand âfeltâ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that âjerkâ and âtwerpâ and âpunkâ and ânitwitâ and âdorkâ and âassâ and âgoonâ and âtwitâ and âdodoâ and âbumâ and ânerdâ and âdunceâ and âturdâ and âboobâ and âchumpâ and âbitchâ and âbastardâ and âprudeâ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add âturkeyâ and âsquirrelâ as well?