A lot of well-known bloggers and pundits like to talk about the 80-20 rule. In relation to technology, the idea is this: the best way to create a Fast Company and get featured on Tech Crunch (preferably becoming rich and famous in the process) is to nail the 20% of features your customers want and then forget about the rest. The thing they don’t tell you is which 20% to focus on.
While a valid general principle, it turns out that it is incredibly difficult to nail down exactly which of all the features on the table fall into that magical 20%. To be sure, conducting usability studies can help. However, there is no escaping the fact that people are unique individuals. The larger the market you are going after, the more likely you are to end up with overlapping or disjoint 20’s. In other words, my 20% is not your 20%. And this group’s 20% is not the same as it was yesterday. No market is completely homogeneous, no matter how small (even a single individual’s needs change over time).
To put it bluntly, the 80-20 rule is no magic bullet. If successful engineers and business leaders were honest with themselves, they would realize that focusing on the right features is only a piece of the puzzle. Not only does a product have to be useful (solve the right problems), but it also needs to be smart (solve the problems in the right way), and pleasant (appeal to the emotional, social, and ethical needs of the user).
And, of course, you will never get a well-designed widget in the first place if you don’t have the right people and the right process. The point is, you aren’t in control of your success. Principles are. Your job is to put them in place and start the wheels turning.
The needs of your market change over time, and that change accelerates every year as our cultures become more and more globalized. You need to stay on your toes, constantly readjusting your features and process. Even if things are going well, and you have most of the features in your product that most people want (implemented the way most people like), you simply aren’t done. Jakob Nielsen writes:
Taking a metaphor from the airline industry, it’s now time for you to study “safe flights.” Historically, the airline industry improved safety by studying airline accidents. Modern airplanes now crash so rarely that the industry studies safe flights to achieve further improvements, investigating why flights are safe and whether they had any close calls.
You can always do better.
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