Kris Jordan posted a summary of Jason Fried’s keynote speech “Be a Software Curator” from the Web 2.0 conference in New York last week. While I don’t always agree with Jason’s product philosophy completely I think he’s spot-on with regard to knowing when enough is enough on the number of features. “Take this water bottle, if it’s heavy I know it’s full. If it was twice as big and painted solid we could agree it was a terrible design. We can look at an object and know whether or not something has good or bad design just by looking at it. Software doesn’t have that kind of instant ‘a-ha’ nebulous feedback. It doesn’t have edges. It doesn’t cast shadows. It’s just there and often expands and continues to expand.”
While I appreciate the 15% of MS Word features that I actually use, it is important to keep your products Market-Driven and ensure you’re ‘connecting the dots’ with real business value not just developing features for the sake of features.
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