Imagine your product is a circle.
Now imagine that a “perfect” circle is the perfect “product”. Products come in all shapes and sizes — just like circles.
Let’s assume we have an existing product
It’s reasonably sized, maybe a little lumpy in some places but that’s ok. It’s still a work in progress after all. Customers care more about your product getting better than they do about you ironing out all of its little kinks. Or in other words, what you really care about is making your circle bigger.
Products usually begin as grand ideas. Big, unattainable circles that you aspire to.
But getting there straight away isn’t possible. You don’t have the necessary resources so you start scoping. You think in terms of cupcakes and build a much smaller, much more attainable representation of the future.
This is what I call the Outside In approach to building product. You distill your grand ambitions into smaller chunks of work that are both achievable and representative of the future. This scoping is crucial to defining the smallest possible iteration, lest you produce bloatware. Thinking from the outside in promotes longer term, mission focused thinking and alignment with a predetermined vision. The key elements are that you think far enough ahead, define a new feature (or set of features) that will grow your product to its new size, scope it down to a reasonable size, do up detailed designs (right down to content) and release your iteration once built so that customers see your product grow to its new size instantaneously.
But circles can also be extruded outwards. I call this the Inside Out approach.
Why play a guessing game when there’s enough low hanging fruit that your product can feed on for the foreseeable? Rather than prophesying about your future, why not just take the next most obvious step and build that. Assuming you’re familiar with your product this should be blatantly obvious, and at the very least ask your customers they’ll certainly tell you what they want.
Sure there will be lumps and bumps as you go, but they’re no worse than those that already existed when you started. This approach lends itself really nicely to prototyping. You can iterate quickly and decide where to go next at every step of the process. Because there is no upfront planning, detailed decisions such as visual designs and content can be delayed until ambiguity is resolved in favour of more fundamental interactions.
Perhaps the outside in approach results in product bloat over time. You hypothesised that a certain feature would be used during scoping so you went ahead and built it only to find out that it’s not really all that useful to customers. And perhaps the inside out approach leads to a local optima. Without proper foresight you build feature on top of feature until you end up with a perfect ellipse rather than the perfect circle. Or worse still your circle doesn’t grow at all, ideas are bandied about and small strides are made but never finished.
The point isn’t that one approach is objectively better than the other. I have seen both put to use with great effect. With proper consideration and some guard rails both approaches end up with an equally perfect future circle.
Originally published at http://daibhin.github.io.