My boss (SD) gave a presentation at a company ops meetings many moons ago, and he said something that stuck with me ever since. So much, that I want to get it off my chest and blog about it!
What is ONE characteristic of a "GREAT Product? Yes, "GREAT" is subjective, but I'm leaving that up to your discretion. The deal is, what is one thing that separates one fantastic tool/utility/product you use from the rest which you don't?
At first, I thought about Object Oriented Programming (OPP) employed, Test Driven Development (TDD) used, driven developers, awesome QA people, correctly written development specs. All very good things, but even with those, products can fail! Then I thought more about environments, corporate funding, customer focused products....again, things bad products can claim too!
So WTF was the ONE thing my boss was eluding too! Here's some hints, how did Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Lotus and WordPerfect all start off? Were they 100 people corporate conglomerates? No, they were small, focused teams that produced something very small, very focused, very targetted. THEN they grew!
Still confused. Release something small THAT WORKS! Then grow! Don't try to release something that means EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE! You'll never release or you'll completely miss the mark. YES! You will! Stop argueing with your LCD, YES YOU WILL MISS YOUR TARGET!
There are COUNTLESS stories about product's/games/utilties which initially shipped to HUGE success, then they tried to go BIGTIME and just couldn't re-release. The eventually failed. Something Google's known for, is no team is larger than 6/7/8 people! That's it! They take Agile to heart! I've heard RIM does something similar. No wonder a lot of people like Agile, it make sure teams are small, working, and releasing! Our company, Privasoft's been doing Agile for a year now and everyone loves it! Ya, sure there are hiccups, but don't even try telling me everyone is perfectly in love with the Waterfall approach neither?! And if you think Yourdon nailed it, then someone should nail you! Yourdon's structured analaysis and design was good 15-20 years ago, but certainly not in the internet age!
The one thing, the one negative aspect people continue to say why this doesn't work is, spaghetti code/features. I have to ask you though, if you're product never ships, is it really a product? If you're in constant feature feedback loops and perpetual scope-creep, are you REALLY making a sellable product?
So what's the jist of this blog? If you're making a product, any product (like maybe for the upcoming WP7? LOL), then try making a product with a small target audience, then grow it with frequent updates! Existing customers will see you're constantly improving the product and new customers will get a very stable product/platform!
Now that's off my chest, it's time to grab a coffee and get coding!