If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

Read something similar the other day about the original Walkman.

The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only cost a negligible amount to add.

Someone cleverer said no, because if you add that feature now people will be confused what it is for. If they don’t want to record audio, they’ll think the product isn’t for them.

Apple messed up one thing about the iPad, which made me never use mine and eventually give it away. Basically, my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged. Because I only want to use it about once a week, that means I have to leave it plugged in all the time. Of course I or someone else inevitably wants to plug something else into that charger, so the iPad gets unplugged and forgotten about. Then, in a week when I actually want to use it, it's dead, and I use something else. The result was, I literally never used it.

The hardest part of product management is saying no to reasonably good ideas. Bad ideas are pretty easy.

Survival bias powers these "insights", 100% of the time.

If the barrier to adding that new feature is removed, what happens?

If the cost is reduced — and becomes closer to zero — there's probably more chance the feature will be added ..

.. in which case, the product is less likely to be great.

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So perhaps, the key superpower in the age of LLM developed software is the ability to say no.

So firstly:

The guy who created Gmail is now 49 years old.

Why does that blow me away?

Secondly, where else does this apply beyond hardware, beyond the world of tech even?

I've had so much fun writing small apps in pure JS and HTML witj Gemini (no harness or agent, just the free web chat) because it's forced me to keep my index.html below 1000 lines. I love the forced constraints. It's liberating. My day job is wrangling production-level codebases of a monolith service, so my tiny web apps let me live out the fantasy of cutting features instead of adding them.

I think we're about to be overwhelmed with good software that isn't great.

> For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability.

This was great snark.

Fewer features = smaller frame, easier to satisfy, better customer targeting.

In any case, the landing page needs to be perfect. Anything less and you have 0 chance.

The most important innovation is in sales and marketing.

If you don't have brand recognition, your landing page has to make up for that. Making up the difference seems to be getting more difficult with each passing year. People are extremely cautious and getting increasingly so.

The average B2B user nowadays is literally triggered by anything remotely unfamiliar.

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