Maintaining Focus (While Building an App That Does Everything)

A few days ago, I revealed my second major app for iOS. Today is ”A talking wake-up alarm which reads out and displays information about your day in a structured interface”.

During the development of my first iOS app, I learnt about the importance of focus when building a product. Focus means giving all the attention to a small number of great ideas, and eliminating everything else. It results in shipping on time, and ensures that you have a solid product that meets user expectations, without unneeded distraction.

Because Today required delivering such a wide spectrum of information, I knew I was taking on a large project, and that focussing was more important than ever if I wanted to ship, and to deliver something which had the right amount of depth, and without clutter.

While completing the project has taken me a year, I feel that without maintaining focus, it would’ve taken a good deal longer. And the finished product would have included a lot of that clutter.

Because maintaining focus is such an important concept, relevant across all sorts of projects, I wanted to share it’s importance, and how to achieve it.

The Mission Statement

When you begin developing a new product, you need to create a Mission Statement — the purpose of your product defined in a few lines. ”A talking wake-up alarm which reads out and displays information about your day in a structured interface”. By defining your purpose, you’re giving yourself a concrete direction, and now every idea you come up with should be supportive of that.

Letting Go

As you work on your product, you’ll explore a large number of exciting ideas which you’d love to implement. The unfortunate truth, though, is that product development takes a long time. From experience, it usually takes about 3x longer than you think it will, and you simply won’t have enough time to implement all of your ideas. That means saying “no” to a lot of good ones. That means making sure every idea you say “yes” to is really important.

The importance of each feature can be judged on a number of different factors, such as “How many people will use it?”, “Does this help me target an intended niche audience?”, “How much functionality does it add?” and “How much value does it add to the user experience?”. But, most crucially, “Does it support my mission statement?”. Evaluating each feature like this will help you to determine which of them are most important and will serve your product best.

Saying “no” to good ideas is tough, but it’s something you need to become comfortable with. If you fail to focus on the things that are truly important, you’ll be losing a lot of valuable time, and your product will become derailed. But by turning down a lot of good ideas, and focussing on the most important ones, you end up with a series of perfected final features which deliver on your Mission Statement.

The Result

By focussing on the right things, you should be able to build a product which fulfils your Mission Statement, and meets the needs of users. Due to lack of convolution, users should also have a more positive experience with your product. And, through eliminating time spent on non-important features, you’re also able to ship within a good time frame.

I’ve personally found maintaining focus to be one of the most difficult parts of creating a product, but also one of the most important, and so I believe it should always be taken seriously during the development process.