People’s Software Company

We’re working on a release, and we’re continually moving back and forth between the desire to add features and the product imperative to pare away features, deliver the essence, and truly simplify.

The lessons of product development at Yahoo! Personals–which was a big shop, with lots of resources (compared to our tiny team)–were that focused, iterative and simple worked best. Every time.

The way to win at product was to listen to your customer and give them what they wanted–and to be able to rejigger your first release to accentuate and focus on what they told you they wanted (in a big company, this was hard to do quickly enough).

Keep it simple isn’t ust a catch phrase, it is a development requirement.

So, coming across this note by Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wegner resonated with me big time right now:

“How should you reconcile listening to your customers with your strategy? This is often the hardest part. You have a strategy that you believe in. It’s difficult enough to not outright ignore any customer feedback that’s not on strategy. After all, you don’t want to be a flag waving in the wind and shifting with every breeze. But how can you tell that apart from your customers telling you that your strategy is actually wrong? What if you are trying to solve too hard a problem, when the customers really need something much simpler?”