As a sales-bot, I love sitting in on development meetings. It’s probably my favorite activity at Tightrope. We get to talk about new features in upcoming releases and how we’re going to rule our industry with these groundbreaking ideas. I remember how excited I was when we came up with the idea of reading RSS feeds into Carousel. By several months, we were the first to do it and I was convinced that this would be the killer feature that would shame those who dared compete against us.
Of course, RSS was added, our customers loved it and our competitors added the same feature to their systems shortly thereafter, either because they’re no-good-copy-cats or because it was obvious that digital signage systems should read RSS feeds.
If you flew in from Mars only to look at the software industry, you would rightly observe that any given tool created from software lives or dies on its feature set. Once a product is released, it’s evaluated against its peers on its aesthetic and price, but ultimately there is some chart with rows of check boxes that show which one is better than the other.
This led me to think about the elements that drive the success of a company and the software that it creates. I came up with six:
- Features: Does the product have features that make people’s lives easier?
- Aesthetics: Is the software pleasing to work with? Is it beautiful? Is it accessible?
- Stability and Quality: Is the product reliable? Can I use it reliably and is it documented? Is the product deep?
- Economy: Does the product represent a good use of resources, both in terms of money paid and/or in hardware and system requirements? Is it cheap to maintain? How much training does it require? What are the support costs, both from the vendor and from your own staff?
- Supportand Ecosystem: Is the product supported by the organization that made it and by its users? Does it have a community? Does it have mind share? Does it have momentum?
- Profitability: Is the software profitable for those involved? This can be money, fame or a sense of purpose (if you’re not getting paid to develop it).
I believe that each of these elements is important in a software project and that you need to pay attention to all of them. I know that for our systems, our dealers wouldn’t sell our product if it wasn’t profitable and neither would we. If our products aren’t stable, users would run, not walk, to another solution. Our online forums and training videos have been a huge reason for the loyalty that our customers have shown and I believe they’ve increased our sales, as well.
But we don’t market any of these things. Rarely do you see an advertisement from a software company that talks about their awesome online chat system for support or even the stability of their product. It’s only features that we seem to care about.
This is a tragedy and it is a reality. I do not think that I would be successful, taking out ads on how great our software is because it’s so profitable for Tightrope. But, when we recognize that marketing’s bizarre obsession with features is in fact a bizarre obsession, we’ve learned the key for success in guiding a software project. If I am right and there are six levers to pull, it is not helpful to only keep coming back to features when you’re trying to move the ball forward.
To put a finer point on it, I’m getting fat. When I was a teenager, I would obsess about how skinny I was. It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school that I broke 100 pounds, which would have been fine, except I was almost six feet tall by then. Now I’m in my thirties and the constant soda beverages and junk food have caught up with me. While there are very few foods that I won’t eat, it’s sugar and other carbohydrates that I always come back to and my Wii ($249.99) Fit ($89.99) has recently informed me that I’m now a fat pig. Thanks, Nintendo.
Features in software and sugar in food have a few things in common. First, they’re both fast acting. It may take years to develop a reputation for stability and nobody will know that your software is stable until some time has passed. But, they can see right away that it now sends email or allows you to attach notes to documents… which are two features that are always added to software, eventually.
Like sugar, the positive impact that features have on a software product wear off quickly, as well. Competitors can easily see what you’ve added and will quickly copy your best ideas. Only the truly stupid ideas that you’ve burdened your software with will be yours alone and what’s awesome is that they get to go last, implementing your ideas with the benefit of your example. Anyone who’s ever lost money in Blackjack knows that going last is always better.
And if you think I haven’t driven this analogy completely into the ground, consider that also like sugar, too many features lead to the ugly specter of your fat, bloated, middle aged software getting its butt kicked by a younger piece of software whose metabolism has not yet mellowed and doesn’t yet suffer under the weight of all of those crappy features that got added just because a sales person, like me, thought they needed them.
Better to pull all of the levers of good software. Spending resources on the ecosystem of your product builds loyalty and it makes fans of your customers. It also gives you excellent feedback and, if you listen to that feedback, rarely will you add features that don’t get used. How about finding ways to make it cheaper and either increasing its value or allowing you to hoard more cash for yourself and your resellers?
In fact, why not make an occasional release that has no features at all? How about a version that just re-factors sections of the code that were inefficient, unstable or otherwise holding the product back? I’m not talking bug fixes here, but real improvements under the hood that make the system more efficient, faster and reliable.
The bottom line is that like sugar, features are commodities (the analogy that keeps on giving) easily copied by competitors and focusing on them means short term gains and long-term failure. The long-term success of software depends on a balanced approach that recognizes every aspect of why people want our software. It’s a sin, all to common in the marketing department and with geeks who love toys, to advocate for the bloating of software, instead of for a balanced, healthy diet.
A Balanced Software Diet:
As a sales-bot, I love sitting in on development meetings. It’s probably my favorite activity at Tightrope. We get to talk about new features in upcoming releases and how we’re going to rule our industry with these groundbreaking ideas. I remember how excited I was when we came up with the idea of reading RSS feeds into Carousel. By several months, we were the first to do it and I was convinced that this would be the killer feature that would shame those who dared compete against us.
Of course, RSS was added, our customers loved it and our competitors added the same feature to their systems shortly thereafter, either because they’re no-good-copy-cats or because it was obvious that digital signage systems should read RSS feeds.
If you flew in from Mars only to look at the software industry, you would rightly observe that any given tool created from software lives or dies on its feature set. Once a product is released, it’s evaluated against its peers on its aesthetic and price, but ultimately there is some chart with rows of check boxes that show which one is better than the other.
This led me to think about the elements that drive the success of a company and the software that it creates. I came up with six:
I believe that each of these elements is important in a software project and that you need to pay attention to all of them. I know that for our systems, our dealers wouldn’t sell our product if it wasn’t profitable and neither would we. If our products aren’t stable, users would run, not walk, to another solution. Our online forums and training videos have been a huge reason for the loyalty that our customers have shown and I believe they’ve increased our sales, as well.
But we don’t market any of these things. Rarely do you see an advertisement from a software company that talks about their awesome online chat system for support or even the stability of their product. It’s only features that we seem to care about.
This is a tragedy and it is a reality. I do not think that I would be successful, taking out ads on how great our software is because it’s so profitable for Tightrope. But, when we recognize that marketing’s bizarre obsession with features is in fact a bizarre obsession, we’ve learned the key for success in guiding a software project. If I am right and there are six levers to pull, it is not helpful to only keep coming back to features when you’re trying to move the ball forward.
To put a finer point on it, I’m getting fat. When I was a teenager, I would obsess about how skinny I was. It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school that I broke 100 pounds, which would have been fine, except I was almost six feet tall by then. Now I’m in my thirties and the constant soda beverages and junk food have caught up with me. While there are very few foods that I won’t eat, it’s sugar and other carbohydrates that I always come back to and my Wii ($249.99) Fit ($89.99) has recently informed me that I’m now a fat pig. Thanks, Nintendo.
Features in software and sugar in food have a few things in common. First, they’re both fast acting. It may take years to develop a reputation for stability and nobody will know that your software is stable until some time has passed. But, they can see right away that it now sends email or allows you to attach notes to documents… which are two features that are always added to software, eventually.
Like sugar, the positive impact that features have on a software product wear off quickly, as well. Competitors can easily see what you’ve added and will quickly copy your best ideas. Only the truly stupid ideas that you’ve burdened your software with will be yours alone and what’s awesome is that they get to go last, implementing your ideas with the benefit of your example. Anyone who’s ever lost money in Blackjack knows that going last is always better.
And if you think I haven’t driven this analogy completely into the ground, consider that also like sugar, too many features lead to the ugly specter of your fat, bloated, middle aged software getting its butt kicked by a younger piece of software whose metabolism has not yet mellowed and doesn’t yet suffer under the weight of all of those crappy features that got added just because a sales person, like me, thought they needed them.
Better to pull all of the levers of good software. Spending resources on the ecosystem of your product builds loyalty and it makes fans of your customers. It also gives you excellent feedback and, if you listen to that feedback, rarely will you add features that don’t get used. How about finding ways to make it cheaper and either increasing its value or allowing you to hoard more cash for yourself and your resellers?
In fact, why not make an occasional release that has no features at all? How about a version that just re-factors sections of the code that were inefficient, unstable or otherwise holding the product back? I’m not talking bug fixes here, but real improvements under the hood that make the system more efficient, faster and reliable.
The bottom line is that like sugar, features are commodities (the analogy that keeps on giving) easily copied by competitors and focusing on them means short term gains and long-term failure. The long-term success of software depends on a balanced approach that recognizes every aspect of why people want our software. It’s a sin, all to common in the marketing department and with geeks who love toys, to advocate for the bloating of software, instead of for a balanced, healthy diet.