Sufficiently Delightful is the new Good Enough

I recently wrote a blog post titled Why aim for good enough? where I made the rather common point that once a product does what it needs to do, as well as it needs to do it, any further effort will be wasted effort.

Today, I would however like to revisit the phrase “good enough”.

It can’t be denied there is something inherently depressing about this phrase. Few of us have got as our life goal to just be good enough. We want to do well. We want to achieve something that we can feel proud of. Telling a developer or UX designer (or product owner, for that matter) to only aim for “good enough” is telling them that what they do is not important. It doesn’t matter if they do it brilliantly.

I still very much stand by the sentiment that gold plating is wasteful but I will no longer use the phrase “good enough” to describe what we’re aiming for. From now on, the phrase I will be choosing instead is “sufficiently delightful”.

Borrowing a sentence from Adam Berry describing the concept of the Minimum Delightful Product (a more desirable alternative to the Minimum Viable Product), a product is delightful when it works the way you’d expect and the experience is highly satisfying.

We need to make sure that it is sufficiently so.

Sufficiently delightful is good enough for me.