What HGTV Taught Me about Product Development
In software we regularly talk about shipping a “minimum viable product”. The idea behind this is that if you wait till your product has all of the features and polish you want then you’ll never ship. So you should trim your product down to the “minimum viable product”, ship, then iterate.
There are a lot of opinions on how to do this properly and some argue it’s just a bad idea all together. I want to share my own opinion on this after years of building and shipping products and, more importantly, after years of watching HGTV.
Love It or List It
If you’re not familiar with HGTV, then we’re probably not that good of friends. It’s a television network that has a bunch of shows on buying, selling and remodeling homes. While I have many favorite shows, I want to focus on one in particular: Love It or List It.
The concept of this show is that there is a family that’s torn on whether or not they should stay in their house. Usually one family member thinks that with a few renovations their house will be great and the other family member thinks that the only option is to move into a different house.
The couple meets up with the show hosts, Hilary and David, and it becomes a competition between the two of them. David is a real estate agent and goes out and shows the couple the best houses they can afford in the neighborhoods they like. Hilary is a designer and works on renovating their current house to make it work for them. In the end the couple has the choice between “loving it” (staying in their newly renovated house) or “listing it” (moving to one of the houses that David found for them).
At the beginning of each episode, Hilary meets with the family to discuss what changes need to be made to the house in order to convince them to stay. They also figure out the family’s renovation budget. Every episode the family’s “must have to stay” list is too big for their budget. Hilary always tells them there’s no way they’ll be able to get all of the features they want, so they stack rank all of the requests.
David usually finds them a pretty awesome house: move-in ready with beautiful finishes and all of the requirements they ask for (size, number of bedrooms, yard, location, etc). Sometimes it’s a little bit over budget for them but it’s always bigger and better than their current house.
Hilary has to make some difficult decisions along the way. She’ll usually decide to cut at least one major request from the family like a master bathroom update or sometimes even the full new kitchen. The couple is always pissed off and says “if we don’t get all of these features we’ll definitely have to move”.
The thing that always stands out to me is that Hilary spends a ton of money on what seem like very minor details and then cuts huge pieces of the plans. I find myself yelling at the TV, “Why did you spend $2000 on a super fancy kitchen sink when their bathroom still sucks?!? Couldn’t you have put that money to better use in other places? Did you really have to buy all new furniture for the living room? Couldn’t you have done SOMETHING with their yard?”
But in the end the completed parts of the house always look amazing. The family is blown away with the quality of the work that was done and they more often than not decide to “love it” and stay in their house, even though many of their “needs” were not met. And the reason for this is because of the details and the quality of the features that are completed.
It’s as if Hilary says, “we said we’d give you a new kitchen and we gave you the best kitchen you’ve ever seen” or “we told you we were going to give you a new master suite and we gave you the most incredible master suite in the city.”
The fact that some of the features don’t make the cut is okay because the quality of the rooms that are done is off the charts. They’d never get that quality in any other house in their price range. Plus, they can always update those other rooms later.
I was curious so I looked up the win stats on this show and it turns out that Hilary has won 60% of the episodes even though she never delivers the family’s full request list and David always does. And when David does win it’s usually because of something that was unfixable with a renovation like “we just need more space”.
Building Products
When building products we talk a lot about scoping down to the minimum viable product so we can quickly build, ship and iterate. What a lot of people take that to mean is to trim down each individual feature to it’s minimum shippable state and deliver a lot of those features. It’s the theory that you deliver value by delivering more features and tools. You can always add the polish later (side note: you probably won’t).
But Love It or List It teaches the opposite: trim down your feature list and keep the polish. Figure out the minimum set of features that tells your product story and cut the rest. Some of these cuts will be painful. They may even feel like deal breakers, but cutting these will enable you to actually complete what you have. Commit to every feature you build. If you can’t commit now, don’t build it yet. It’s always better to release a few outstanding features than it is to release a handful of decent features.
Don’t build features, build products.
Nobody wants a set of minimum viable features. They want a product. Which are you making?
