Five critical questions for your product

My favourite solution analogies

Just an aggregation, not my ideas.

1. Are you a vitamin tablet or a painkiller?

90% of people use painkillers. 10% use vitamin tablets*. Is your solution a nice-to-have or a need-to-have?

* Numbers made up for dramatic effect.

2. Does your solution pass the toothbrush test?

Sergey Brin loves this one: Will I use this as much as my toothbrush? If not, I will not build this solution.

Hold your horses, you obviously don’t need to be a toothbrush. But thinking about usage or problem frequency is incredibly important.

3. Are you building the right thing, or building the thing right?

Some engineers start with building the craziest database structure they’ve ever built for a simple web app with 0 users. “Just in case it scales”. Are you focusing on figuring out what to build? (You should).

4. Are insourcing all activities of the airport?

Airports don’t pick you up at your home or pack your bags. But they want to be sure you don’t bring a gun, so they want to scan your bag, rather than you checking a box saying “no, no guns here, chief”. Be sure about what to insource and outsource, more here.

5. Are you making candy?

I stumbled upon this option: are you making candy? Something that’s is damaging on the long run for your users?

What are the unintended consequences if somebody overuses your product? What are the unintended side-effects to the environment? Yada, yada, yada.