Comments on: Prioritizing software requirements – am I hot or not?

By: Regelwerk » Interaction Design und BRM

Regelwerk » Interaction Design und BRM — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:12:00 +0000

[...] Weiterführender Lesestoff: Prioritizing software requirements – am I hot or not? Prioritizing Software Requirements with Kano Analysis Alan Cooper: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. [...]

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 19:40:57 +0000

Thanks Michael!

Quickbooks is a great example of bloat-ware – and even better than Lotus Notes in terms of the feature-creep making it hard to do simple stuff. At least with Notes it was still easy to do simple stuff.

ICQ is another good example.

Great post too. I just subscribed and expect to read more great stuff!

Scott

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 03:50:17 +0000

Having done product management and marketing for five different companies, I can see the value in the “simpler is better” approach taken by the Basecamp folks.

My complaint with most sotware that has been around more than 5 years is that they suffer from insane feature-bloat, not that they’re missing features. A great example is QuickBooks – it used to be insanely weas-to-use about 6 years ago. Now it is practically unsuable for a new user!

I like the 80/20 rule in general. I’ve seen some folks make an argument for “hiding” power-user features under “Advanced” menu – which is a nice enough idea.

BTW – for those interested, I made a detailed post at my blog on some practical challenges in prioritizion that I’ve faced ( http://michael.hightechproductmanagement.com/ ) – and I haven’t necessarily overcome! :)

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 17:45:52 +0000

Also - here's a good article from eWeek, Why features don't matter any more, which talks about how hard it is to do what 37signals does, and also talks about why they would want to do it.

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 13:24:05 +0000

Thanks Deepak for commenting.

I had a similar sense of “wishing for more features” when looking at Basecamp about a year ago. Although these applications may not be providing the set of features you or I want, 37signals’ success leads me to conclude that they are providing the right set of 80/20 features to get heavy user adoption.

Their market success demonstrates that they are doing something right.

Google is another great example. The delete button that they just added is a great example of your second point. There’s been a loud shout of “thanks” (or “finally!”) in response to the delete button’s introduction. Clearly a valuable feature that many people have wanted. I believe there was even a greasemonkey script that added a delete button to their site.

Thanks for reading and posting. What do other folks think?

By: Deepak Singh

Deepak Singh — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 08:05:18 +0000

As a former product manager, I found the 37Signals philosophy very intriguing. I am still not completely conviced though. I am a heavy backpack user and I like its simplicity. Similarly for Google. The question in my mind is what one means by “minimally functional”. To me that means having sufficient functionality to be usable for the most common tasks the majority of users want to perform. Is that consistent with the 37Signals model? I am not sure. There is also the possibility of a key customer skewing that set of functionality.