Core Product Functionality: Build Less Is To Build More

In his book Rework Jason Fried says to start at the epicenter, and that the stuff you have to do is where you begin.

He suggests asking the following:

If I took this away, would what I’m selling still exist?

It is a way of defining what part of your equation can’t be removed. If certain features are not a thing, then those things are not your epicenter. When you do find it, you should put all focus in making it the best it can be. It will all be reliant on that foundation. And that foundation is what becomes the core functionality of your product.

Define the Core

No matter what the product, there is always a core functionality that justifies why a product exists. For Buffer that is scheduling social media posts, for Medium is providing a platform to publish content and for Skyscanner it is a comparison tool for finding cheap flights.

Wouter de Bres asks the question “What does a product do?”. By defining the answer “It lets you do Y”, you can establish the core of a product. Not the A,B,C and D features, but the Y.

That Y feature is what you make amazing!

Workout the core

Core functionality can be tedious work, but is is essential in making a truly amazing product. An in depth analysis would involve user behavior, customer feedback, and plenty of tests before anything would be shipped. Like the body’s core is vital to peak physical performance. Sure, you can have big arms, and solid calves, but they only allow you to specific actions well. Strengthen your core, however, benefits the whole body. You can lift more, run faster and climb stairs easier. You become better at the basics.

But a lot of people don’t enjoy the core workout. It doesn’t show immediate results. You can’t show them off straight away.

Referencing Gina Trapani and her post on Fast Company, you should do your worst task first thing in the morning. By “worst” Gina means “most important” and by “most important” she means the task you are most likely to procrastinate on.

Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day — Mark Twain

It can typically be the core that is your frogs legs. It is not necessarily exciting, or new. You may not even be able to directly sell it as a feature, but it is integral to making an amazing product. If you are building an app uploading pictures to a shared network, you better make damned sure that the uploading the picture and sharing aspects are nailed down.

So get back to the core, and make that as strong as possible. Do that workout first thing, and build products that strengthening the core functionality of what you are selling.

Watch out for the backlog

For a business, especially from a sales, marketing and board of directors perspective, there is “Yes, we have released feature A and B” mentality. The idea of adding more sounds great, but in reality if can often dilute the core of your product. The world of business has this obscure wisdom that to beat your competitors, you need to have more than them.

Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors you need to one-up them at any opporunity. Build more features. Spend more money. This of course leads to scope creep and a growing backlog of features in the backlog.

But a big danger comes from the feature backlog. As you collect a growing list of features, they soon get built even if they are not necessary and only requested by a few people. The features being built should ultimately tie back to strengthening the core. Features that truly improve the core of the product.

Metric Focussed Instead of Feature Focussed

To avoid the productivity fallacy it is essential for a product team to be focussed on the key metrics of their core functionality. All effort should be focussed on boosting those numbers.

When you measure productivity and success not by the amount of features that have been shipped but by the height of your most important metric(s), the dynamics in a product team will change. Testing, analyzing data and usage, and improving micro interactions will become a bigger and more accepted part of sprint cycles. Resulting in a simpler product with a greater user experience 🎉.

Build Less

Referencing Jason Fried and his book Getting Real, you should build less.

Less features
Less options/preferences
Less people and corporate structure
Less meetings and abstractions
Less promises

Less is more. Reducing the mass or bloat around a product lets you get back to the core. For your body, blasting all that excess fat away exposes your core. So do the same for your product, and blast away the fat.

Conclusion

The approach to building less is nothing new. It is just making sure you keep a focus on the epicenter of your product. That epicenter is the core functionality, that if you removed every other feature not important, the ones remaining would still be a saleable product.

Thanks for reading!

Sources

Getting Real, By Jason Fried. Build Less: https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Build_Less.php

Rework, By Jason Fried. 2010. Start at the epicenter: https://37signals.com/rework

Work Smart: Do Your Worst Task First (Or, Eat a Live Frog Every Morning): http://www.fastcompany.com/1592454/work-smart-do-your-worst-task-first-or-eat-live-frog-every-morning