Focus On Getting One Thing Right for Your Customers
In the modern digital landscape, the current trend toward “super apps” and “gated economies” being championed by industry giants like Apple, WeChat, and Amazon to name a few can give the impression that apps that focus on doing one thing well are past their prime, but this could not be further from the truth. Apps like Noom and Calm help users improve their wellness by focusing on one aspect of their health. Expensify simplifies the drudgery of tracking business expenses. CashApp and Venmo both excel at making transferring money between friends exceptionally easy. All of these examples reinforce the principle that “doing one thing, really well” is still valuable enough for these apps to not just have a permanent place on users’ devices, but a high level of stickiness and engagement.
The Most Common Barriers to Getting One Thing Right
The difficult truth is that simplifying a product is actually not so simple. Customers are always requesting features to “enhance” their experience, and business stakeholders adapt their requests and goals to the shifting sands of the business environment. The pressure to say “yes” to a request for any number of reasons can be intense. This diffusion of focus (and as a result, diffusion of app functionality) saps the resources of product development teams and muddles the value proposition of the apps they develop. Here are just a few “false truths” which may be preventing your app from delivering on its full potential.
The “everyone is an audience” fallacy: One of the most insidious leeches of resources is horizontal scaling of a product’s target audience, which sometimes presents itself as “everyone is a potential customer” or “this app works for anyone.” This is a trap masquerading as an opportunity because it gives product and business leaders the impression of limitless growth potential, which makes it possible to conveniently ignore the multiplication of costs to achieve this potential.
Keeping the lights on too long: One of the most difficult decisions a product leader can make is sunsetting a product. The same is true to a lesser degree for app features. If a feature is underperforming, or no longer aligns with the core value proposition of the app in a way that meaningfully enhances the utility of the app for users, it is probably time to sunset that functionality. Not doing so incurs double costs: there is a business cost to continuing to support that feature, while at the same time there is a cognitive cost for your app users in the form of mental overhead (working through or around that feature) and wavering loyalty (if the value your app provides to them is no longer crisp in their mind)
A focus on outputs without regard for outcomes: Probably the most common — and unfortunately the most damaging — barrier to getting one thing right for your users is “feature factory syndrome.” This is a scenario where the demands of the business or customers seem so urgent that teams leap to addressing problems with solutions, without stopping to consider whether solving that problem meaningfully contributes to the core value proposition offered by the app. If the app development team is a Jira-ticket eating machine, and the only levers that get pulled by the business are how many Jira tickets are consumed, the app in question and the team supporting it are not reaching its full potential.
Combined or individually, these false truths of app development can drain the passion and resources of development teams and customers alike, to the point where an app collapses under its own weight and expectations. Simplifying or keeping an app simple from the start keeps the value proposition clear for users, focuses the efforts of product development teams, and allows for deep vertical scaling or owning a specific market segment.
Breaking The Cycle: The Focusing Question
In their popular book, The One Thing, Gary Keller and Jay Papasan champion the concept of a focusing question: “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”. While this tactically focused question is not directly relevant to envisioning the appropriate feature set or scope of an entire app, the principle it embodies is. An adaptation of this question that is relevant for app development leaders is “What is the one thing this app accomplishes for customers, such that having used it their lives are measurably better?”. This outcome might come in the form of dollars saved, time saved, or emotional satisfaction achieved, but if your app is going to be successful with users the value derived needs to be one of the tangible impacts that your app users themselves could describe in no more than one or two sentences.
Getting The Answer Right Means Getting Your App Right
The focusing question of what useful outcome your app provides for users may seem simple but like many things in a business environment, simple is actually harder than complex (which is why it is so handsomely rewarded). There are key principles that are important to adhere to when asking and executing the focusing question.
The one thing is not a hypothesis: There are few things more dangerous than a “build it and they will come” mentality to app development. Having consistent conversations with customers and interrogating in-app behavioral data to understand your customers' preferences and market-level data to stay up to date on market trends are non-negotiable when it comes to delivering a focused and valuable product.
The one thing is an outcome (not a metric): Setting goals should not be done in the form of metrics — but it should be informed by metrics. Using a fictitious example of an app that helps you pay utility bills easily and all at once, a “metric-as-a-goal” might be something like “increase monthly average users of our app” if business-focused or “reduce time spent setting up automatic payments”. Both are beneficial, one to the business, the other to the app user, but both miss the bigger picture of what creates value for the customer: make the process so easy that I wonder why I ever paid bills any other way. This type of outcome-focused objective grants creative freedom to the team developing the app to do whatever is necessary to achieve an objective where the business’s and users’ interests are aligned.
The Impact of Relentlessly Asking the Focusing Question
To reinforce the metrics vs. outcomes analogy, consider a trend unfolding in the marketplace at the time of this guide’s creation: access to cheap capital for businesses is evaporating, and the money-losing practice of acquiring new users at a financial loss is causing businesses to contract or in some cases fail because they chose to focus on hitting metric targets, typically new customers or monthly active users. They succeeded in tailoring the products to acquire customers or hold their attention but failed to build a product that provided enough value that users were willing to pay a sustainable price for, and the business collapses due to externalities, in this case, financing. Focusing on a specific outcome in a way that aligns business and user incentives while retaining a clear value proposition is the best insurance against changing market conditions and the best investment in the growth of the business.
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