Featuritis and Vulnerable Visions
A lifecycle of a software product or an app looks similar to that of a human. In the beginning, products are like toddlers because they can do very few things, as in an MVP. Then they learn to walk and to talk, then adolescence comes and then maturity. Who are the parents of this child, then? Who helps it stand up and walk, who provides the support? Which environment is needed for a software product to thrive and to grow from a toddler to a teen, at least?
There’s one answer to these questions: a vision that the product’s masterminds share with the rest of the world. No doubt, parents are supportive of their children. However, strangers might be completely at odds with the product’s idea, or with what it does exactly that helps, and if that’s the case, no matter how cool the app or the product is, they wouldn’t appreciate it fully.
A striking example of such a gap — though unrelated to software— is the story of rocket science and its founder, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. This man had a vision of aircrafts flying and reaching into the outer space as far back as in the late 19th century. At that time, hardly anyone could have fathomed that such flights are possible at all. It took a better half of the 20th century for the rocket science to get a sufficient pool of followers, as space missions became a fascinating reality.
Something similar to this looks to be true for software products. If they sprout and gain strength in soil fertilized by a mainstream vision, they are lucky. Quandoo, as a dining experience app, is not exactly powered by the mainstream vision, because it seems that everyone is more into food delivery these days, rather than into dining out. A restaurant reservation app stands a long way from rocket science, but sometimes it seems that getting back to solid basics such as making time to go out to have a meal can be as challenging as venturing out into space. So, we are championing our vision of fine dining, and this so not like the vision that feeds the “food delivery” trend. People usually want food delivered when they are busy working, hustling, or doing three jobs, and… they just have no time or energy to go out and to enjoy a meal at a restaurant. In a way, Quandoo as a baby of an app — in line with our human life cycle analogy — finds itself quite lonely in the challenging waters of countering the mainstream trend. Food delivery is a more familiar vision/action for many, and most vessels (read: food delivery apps) stick to familiar shores, while we are out in the ocean largely by ourselves.
Now, as with any sailing in dangerous waters, there can be risks, or, if we continue to compare products with humans, there can be diseases. It appears that the gravest disease that might be picked by a mature product or an app is called featuritis (akin to arthritis, a disease that immobilizes). This disease might befell an innovative product or a gadget/device if its creators forget that the rest of the world haven’t yet fully grasped how cool their baby is. Pasting their subjective creative reality on the potential users is a common cognitive bias with the apps’/products’ parents. I wish we lived in a world where new visions and concepts could be shared telepathically, but the dimension where we dwell isn’t too allowing for telepathy, unfortunately. If users do not see this awesome vision, this awesome new way of doing a certain thing, even a habitual one, they’d stay alienated. Here’s the graph that illustrates this phenomenon:
It’s easy to fall prey to the insidious featuritis. Just as with the individuals, who keep their vision about things to themselves, for one reason or another, the unspoken vision behind a product could be a potential weak spot for the creators, as they quietly stick with a pursuit of improving their app/product. More often than not, however, it’s not enough to do things just quietly, even if that’s what some of us prefer. We’ve got to share our visions, including the ones of a product or an app that we develop, or else we might fall prey to the immobilizing featuritis — or, as the case with humans might be, some real or psychological impediment that makes us feel heavy at heart. It happens to people a lot: instead of being confident about their unique purpose in life and sharing this vision with others, they think that something is innately wrong with them, so they want to add more “features” to themselves, especially if everyone else seems to have these features. It’s not the features that others would buy into, though, neither in fellow humans, nor in software products. People pick up and bond over a shared vision and purpose. Anyway, back to products/apps: on the graph above, the part that goes prior to Happy User Peak is in line with the vision that a user has. The descending part of the curve shows how users grow more and more frustrated with a featuritis-stricken product.
There’s no better cure than prevention, as the old adage goes. For featuritis that might befall an app or a product, this prevention consists in building new islands, or even continents, of the shared vision, where users would find their safe harbor, just like the Pilgrims, and stay for good. Featuritis is easy to catch if a product/dev team go into stratospheric heights as power users of their product, ignoring the fact that an average user hasn’t come anywhere close to that, or hasn’t been let in on the coolness. The inhabitants of the old continents need to be guided to the new lands. This whole process of other people picking up on the new vision can be quite lengthy, as was the case with Tsiolkovsky and the rocket science. Fortunately, things seem to happen faster with software products. Slow or fast, what matters most — for products as well as for individuals — is bringing people up-to-date with the vision and letting them see that it works.
Related:
Why People Are Reluctant to Upgrade
Product Development: Drive or Hitchhike?
Further reading:
This story is based on an earlier article.
