Adequate is not good enough!
Posted on May 21, 2008
Filed Under chit chat, cognifide | 1 Comment
A friend of mine, nicknamed “LeToe” for his rather poor footballing skills, is MD of a global telecommunications company. Big business. In a roundabout way, we came to learn that on one of his staff improvement courses, he was caught trying to motivate an employee by chanting “adequate is not good enough”! Needless to say, whenever we see the human motivator LeToe, adequate is not good enough is always a great source of fun and the first thing we throw at him whenever we meet up. What a plonker!
Clearly adequate is not perfect but as Daniel Tenner convincingly argues, perfection does not exist. Take a look at the picture opposite. As a product company you start at A and wish to build the perfect product that you think is at B. But actually, its a C. Over the years, we have learnt that you need to involve the users both early and often. Release small. Release frequently. Keep releasing! On good days, Flickr was releasing to production every 30 minutes. No question, this certainly helps companies built better products. They inspect and adapt, veering away from the white elephant at B and more towards the holy grail at C. All good so far.
Users change. If fact, I’d argue that today you woke up a different person than you were yesterday. So over time, C is really a moving target. Only a fool would assume that users and their needs stay the same. So if you’re looking for perfection in your products, you’re pretty much going to be chasing your tail. However, if you lower your goal bar slightly and acknowledge this, what you can do is build a better product that strives to meet its users needs but without comprising itself. Oh yes, there comes a time when the product is pulled so far off track that it makes no sense its current form. You just need to know when that time is or as 37signals maintain, don’t get distracted in the first place and let your customers move on if the product no longer meets their needs.
Now, swap product for company, apply the same thinking, and you inevitably arrive at the conclusion that there is no such thing as the perfect company. Even Google are starting to realise this…
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I’ve always been a big fan of K.I.S.S. “methodology”. It is a good thing it’s gaining its momentum.
Combined with “release often” it is probably the easiest way to actually keep in focus making the perfect product and adapting to changes along the way.