One vote of influence

I think that software of any longevity is the end result of a lot of competing forces. There’s the product owner’s own influence, the capabilities and limitations of technology at the time, the collective feedback of its customers, a development team’s strengths and weaknesses, the amount of money (and, hence, time) that can be put into the product and countless other things.

So, it’s not an entirely far-fetched analogy to say that software grows like people do. As a parent, you might have particular aspirations for your child— dreamt while you hold your newborn or during those few-and-far-between moments of early childhood when they’re sleeping and you’re not.

But, in reality, you don’t have full control over the direction of your child’s growth. You have but one vote of influence. As do the friends she gravitates toward. As do his grandparents. As do your financial and time constraints. And, of course, as does the child herself. (I don’t build AI, so perhaps this is where the analogy hits the fork in the road).

As software matures, it brings along all the influences impressed upon it by all preceding factors. In my humble opinion, if you’re a good product owner (or parent) with a powerful — but still singular — vote of influence, you figure out what the software is good at and you encourage it that way. You figure out where its limitations are and embrace them. You learn when to let go of initial aspirations that run counter to where the software is headed.

DoneDone has been built on a large number of constraints. We’ve devoted a very small subset of team members to the product. Even our “full-timers” average, at highest peaks, only 20–25% of the workday on DoneDone any given month. Over the course of eight years, our most consistent and sustainable marketing effort has been writing about code and business and productivity on our blog. The product matures at a rate that our parent organization can sustain, entirely devoid of outside funding.

These are the influences that have made the product. And, as a corollary, the customers that drift toward us are also of a certain ilk. For instance, many of our customers leave us because of missing “agile” features and jump to a product like JIRA. But, many customers arrive at our doorstep after leaving a product like JIRA in search of something far simpler.

Differentiating ourselves in this way was not what we set out to necessarily do from day one, but over time, that’s where the software has gravitated. So, we know what it is and encourage it to keep going in that direction.

There’s no math equation for this journey. Not even fuzzy math. Just observation, faith, and a bit of unconditional parental love.