While a product’s simplicity is its advantage, building a business requires serving your “power users” which ultimately breeds complexity and makes products more powerful but less accessible. It’s called “the product life cycle”...
“The Product Life Cycle”: (1) Customers flock to a simple product, (2) Product adds new features to serve customers + grow biz, (3) Product gets complicated, (4) Customers flock to simple product. 😩
Managing the (un)comfortable tensions to better serve customers AND engage new customers is a big part of #TheMessyMiddle of building product that most teams only learn the hard way.
A few weeks from hitting shelves, now is probably a good time to share that #TheMessyMiddle has an entire section devoted to optimizing your product during the middle stages of your venture. We’ll discuss...
You need to identify what you’re willing to be bad at. Doing so is truly liberating and will help you focus on doing something differentiating exceptionally well. Many examples of products that nailed one thing at expense of many others...
Make one subtraction for every addition. Yeah, sounds crazy, but “one feature in, one feature out” prompts the question: If you would choose to create a new feature instead of one that already exists, why not (sometimes) kill the live feature first? Hmm
Speaking of killing things, we’ll also discuss “killing your darlings” - those little elements (or paragraphs and characters for writers) that you love but don’t need. *Productive* creativity is a war between clarity and possibility.
You also need to beware of creativity (and any ingenuity you inject into your product) that compromises familiarity. Only train your customers to navigate something new when it's absolutely core to what differentiates your product.
Oh, and then we'll do a deep dive on crafting the “first mile” of product experience and why you can never stop, because every cohort of new customers is different. What works for early adopters won’t work for the masses.
Yep, it’s basically a book within a book, so I actually gave this section of the book its own shading/font b/c I know some people will skip it, and some will skip to it. Get your copy: amazon.com/Messy-Middle-F…
