25 Mar 2010
Letting your users make your product
Services like Twitter are interesting to think about because from an engineering perspective, the goals around what users would initially accomplish are not so clear. Yet, at the end of the day, the service was flexible enough to accommodate the user scenarios that eventually manifested themselves, given the ability to broadcast updates (see this post for some interesting scenarios that Twitter enabled). I strongly believe that had Twitter been initially designed & marketed to ‘facilitate meetups between strangers’, it probably wouldn’t have succeeded.
Frequently, I hear from more experienced friends that selling to businesses vs consumers is very different because the consumer market is so fickle. So, an admittedly lofty goal might actually be to keep whatever capability you provide so vague, yet the use of that capability so simple that people can tell you what they want just by using your service. Making this even tougher is that it has to be flexible enough to NOT drive users away once they (or a competitor) realizes what they want and to NOT demand an about-face in strategy. In that case, you might end up not falling prey to how fickle the consumer market actually is.
So, the trifecta: simple, flexible, and powerful. Easy, right? :-)
