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You can always do less

37signals.com

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Re: You can always do less

#11

Post by grinich »

tekomino wrote: post #4

The problem is that this looks good when written but bad when you have to follow it. If you look at 37 Signals products over the years they relentlessly add more and more and more while preaching less and less and less. See disconnect? The truth is that you must always add more otherwise product goes stale. They know it but "do less" as a story sells better...

Doing less is not about letting a product go stale. It's about focus. It's true that all of their products have evolved, but they haven't simply been piling on the features.

The value of a product is not in the number of things it can do. Products stand out by doing one thing very well.

You don't need twenty features. You only need one.

Re: You can always do less

#12

Post by revetkn »

nwjsmith wrote: post #8
tome wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/05/can-you-trust-37signals-with...

This is from May, and 37signals just made a fairly large change to their authentication system (I think its called Launchpad). Their password recovery system now works differently than described in this post, so I doubt they're still storing them plaintext (thank goodness).

Yeah, it may work differently now, but I think the point still holds. I understand that engineering's all about tradeoffs and being practical with your time, but things like plaintext passwords are unacceptable (IMHO) in even the first cut of a production system, let alone an established one with a large userbase.

Re: You can always do less

#13

Post by kevinholesh »

tekomino wrote: post #4

The problem is that this looks good when written but bad when you have to follow it. If you look at 37 Signals products over the years they relentlessly add more and more and more while preaching less and less and less. See disconnect? The truth is that you must always add more otherwise product goes stale. They know it but "do less" as a story sells better...

Their products have definitely grown, but I think they've improved rather than falling victim to feature creep.

Look at what Basecamp could've become without their constant "you can always do less" mentality: http://www.microsoft.com/project/en/us/project-professional-...

Re: You can always do less

#14

Post by z8000 »

This was the best part of the referenced page:

"Don’t be such a suck up Dan."

As if Carl here was just so damn annoyed that Dan beat him to "first DHH! First! Pick me for kickball!" I just picture Jan Brady as Carl: "Marsha Marsha Marsha!"

Ok enough semi entertainment by poking fun at the followers of David (since when did he start going by one name like Prince or Madonna or Quasimoto?)

Re: You can always do less

#15

Post by [deleted] »

tekomino wrote: post #4

The problem is that this looks good when written but bad when you have to follow it. If you look at 37 Signals products over the years they relentlessly add more and more and more while preaching less and less and less. See disconnect? The truth is that you must always add more otherwise product goes stale. They know it but "do less" as a story sells better...

[deleted]

Re: You can always do less

#16

Post by dhh »

tekomino wrote: post #4

The problem is that this looks good when written but bad when you have to follow it. If you look at 37 Signals products over the years they relentlessly add more and more and more while preaching less and less and less. See disconnect? The truth is that you must always add more otherwise product goes stale. They know it but "do less" as a story sells better...

This point wasn't about accumulation of features, although that's a worthy topic in itself. This is about what you need to ship this iteration, this version, that product.

Once you have something out there you'll iterate. And yes, you'll likely add more than you started with. But that's a side point.

Re: You can always do less

#17

Post by teej »

tekomino wrote: post #4

The problem is that this looks good when written but bad when you have to follow it. If you look at 37 Signals products over the years they relentlessly add more and more and more while preaching less and less and less. See disconnect? The truth is that you must always add more otherwise product goes stale. They know it but "do less" as a story sells better...

You're missing the forest for the trees.

The heart of "do less" and "minimum viable product" isn't to do a crappy job or to have a minimalist product. The point is to relentlessly prune your feature set and relentlessly prune your features so that you're solving real problems and offering the most value per feature.

Prune your feature. If you cut two less use-cases from your feature's spec, is it still meeting user's -real- needs? Is it easier to use now because it's less complex?

Prune your featureset. Is that feature something that meets real users needs? Even an HN hero (patio11) had this issue recently when he launched a feature and had all of 2 customers use it.

Get validation. Don't answer these questions by intuition alone. Get customer feedback, hear what they are saying, and do root cause analysis on why they have those complaints. Make sure after you've launched a feature that it's actually solving customer's problems.

Tighten your feedback loop. Living in a black hole for weeks at a time lowers the chance that your feature will actually solve people's problems. Have a feature that will take weeks to build? What's the smallest subset of that feature you can launch that will tell you if it is actually solving real issues? Even if you have to launch that feature internally or to a small set of users, you need to figure out if you're on the right track as soon and as often as possible.

Do less isn't really about having less features. It's a strategy for satisfying the most customer needs for dollar. You do this by seeing a problem, proposing a solution, and building the least you can to verify that your solution is correct.

Re: You can always do less

#18

Post by tekomino »

dhh wrote: post #16
tekomino wrote: post #4

The problem is that this looks good when written but bad when you have to follow it. If you look at 37 Signals products over the years they relentlessly add more and more and more while preaching less and less and less. See disconnect? The truth is that you must always add more otherwise product goes stale. They know it but "do less" as a story sells better...

This point wasn't about accumulation of features, although that's a worthy topic in itself. This is about what you need to ship this iteration, this version, that product. Once you have something out there you'll iterate. And yes, you'll likely add more than you started with. But that's a side point.

You do less, you make less. You do more, you make more (money). The only reason 37 Signals adds more, like every other successful company, is to make more. Less is just a story, more makes money.

In my company no other event generates more cash than adding and doing more in the product. No other event. It is true for any other company...

I am just getting tired of all "less" parroting :-)

Re: You can always do less

#19

Post by davidw »

> What stops most people from doing less is the fear of failure.

I think most people do more because they figure (right or wrong) that it's a good way to compete. Not everyone wrote Rails and has a huge 'following', so they need other barriers to entry for their products.

Re: You can always do less

#20

Post by tjic »

revetkn wrote: post #3

"For every 1 day estimates of a task, there’s a simpler version of that you can do in 3 hours, and an even simpler still you can do in 30 minutes. Back yourself into a corner and these versions will vividly appear before your eye. You can always do less." I wonder if this was the reasoning behind 37s' storing passwords in plaintext instead of taking an extra 10 minutes to write the code to encrypt them?

Ouch That's going to leave a mark!
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