Leon Ho

Never let your product become a half-assed product

Photo credit: tambako (CC BY-SA 2.0)

You have a product, and there are dozens of features you want to add. It always sounds like you need everything in order to win your customers over.

In reality? Features are never felt enough by you and your customers.

No matter how big your team is, your resources and focus are always in constraint. If you only have few features, you can focus and make it as polished and well presented as possible; If you have dozens of features, the time you can spend on each feature will be much limited. If you can’t manage all these efforts, your product will become a half-assed product.

Take Twitter for example, how many core features do they have? And yet they have became one of the biggest social networks.

Don’t argue with me that you need to make your product unpolished because you are aiming for a minimum viable product (MVP). MVP does not mean a half-assed product, period. Your MVP is a set assumptions you made on the product that potentially wins your potential customers attention and engage with you. It doesn’t mean to cut corners. If you don’t have enough time to work on a real functional product, can your MVP be a mockup version of your solution that you can show to customers instead? 

Cut nice-to-have features. Improve must-have features that solve real problems. Writers trim paragraphs to make a good article. Directors remove scenes to make an awesome movie. As an entrepreneur, you need to edit your product in order to make your product fantastic.