Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
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Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
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Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#2Product conventions create an opinionated product; opinionated product creates user delight; user delight creates business success.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#3My company is somehow big on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking, and I feel like the lack of product/engineering people being opinionated is one of its main flaws.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#4It isn’t very clear. The author says you have to create flexible products (using configuration) but down the line, be more opinionated (using convention). He lost me.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#5> I will design it for the average user rather than the power user.
But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share?
I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#6> Beyond the laughs, there is a product lesson in this tweet. It is an example of a product design principle: “convention over configuration”, aka “make the easy things easy, the hard things possible”.
I don't know if the author is trying to use this as an example (since you can customize the behavior) or a counterexample, but the situation describe me of pasting in Word is a bad example of this. It's not even generally possible to paste from another word document and completely match the source formatting 100% (including stuff like text boxes) because of how pasting interacts with the terrible style system.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#7It isn’t very clear. The author says you have to create flexible products (using configuration) but down the line, be more opinionated (using convention). He lost me.
AKA support doing the entire work, and pay attention to what defaults you choose. Don't stop at the first part.
He also says that your flexibility should be enough to fit the target audience, and not much more because you should focus on delighting that audience, not on broadening it.
I actually didn't like the article either. The means he pushes are known to not be very effective, and he makes a completely one sided analysis of a cost/benefit situation. But I think you are focusing too hard on the trees and missed the forest.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#8If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love your product, it’s your job to understand the customers, understand the data, and build the right solution rather than building ALL the solutions.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#9Amazon recently turned on support for Amazon Sidewalk on all of their hardware in my home (convention) and decided it was fine to do this because I could opt out (configuration).
That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site.
Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#10Instead of "opinionated", perhaps this word is a better fit:
Paternalistic (adjective)
(of people in authority) making decisions for other people rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives