Are You Building a Perfect Product or a Valuable Market Solution?

As a 20-year veteran of building all kinds of products in all types of industries, two concepts share top billing in my strategy.

Elegance. On the engineering side, software or otherwise, the solutions that power the product must be flexible, reusable, lightweight and efficient. 

Value. Your product must be sold at a price that makes it clearly valuable to the customer, and built at a cost that makes it undeniably valuable to the company. 

When you build with elegance, you’re building well. When you build for value, you’re building right. Doing both at the same time is mind-bendingly difficult and can wind up destroying a lot of products and sinking a lot of companies. Sacrificing one for the other is also an exercise in failure. 

Building products with both elegance and value is a paradox wrapped inside a Catch-22. It’s difficult to get people to understand this, let alone do it right. 

Allow me to color the problems, starting with fun stories that anyone can understand and teach.

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The Conflation of Elegance and Perfection

Elegant does not mean perfect. In a lot of cases, it doesn’t even mean finished. Most builders, including myself, are perfectionists, and they struggle with this.

Perfection is where doing things well goes off the rails. The needs of customers and thus, the requirements of business, are ever-changing. In the early days of a startup or a product, these changes happen lightning fast. 

How do you get this across? 

Imagine your boss asks you to build a model car. You lock yourself in your room and design and build and glue and document. There are knocks at your door but you ignore them, and instead refine and paint. It’s good, but not great. You start over. You nail it on the third try.

More knocks. You ignore those too, and you even come up with a new type of working model engine that you also build. While the model is heavier now, it makes the car actually work! It moves. Fast. You might even have a patent here.

You can see where I’m going with this.

So there’s that knocking again and now that you’re at a great stopping point, you can finally get up and answer the door. 

It’s your boss. You show her the car. She’s pleasantly surprised. And then she says, “But that won’t fly. We need it to fly now. Our customers want a flying car.”

The Mistake of Chasing Higher Margins

You can cut a lot of corners on a product. And you often should, especially at the beginning. You can prototype, you can MVP, you can crawl/walk/run. 

But once you have the value proposition in sight, you need to be very careful with how you cut, no matter how much the margins increase with each subsequent cut. Because at some point, the value is affected in a way that can’t be reversed or mitigated later.

This one is easier to get across.

It’s like when you were a kid and made a paper snowflake. You cut a corner here, you cut a corner there, and you unfold it and it’s a beautiful work of simple art. But it can be better. So you carefully refold, and cut a few more times. Unfold. Awesome. But it can be better!

How many times in your life did you unfold that paper snowflake and discover that one of your cuts inadvertently resulted in several broken pieces of paper?

The Killer Mistakes In Real Life

I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here, I’ve just made it easier to explain. So here’s the real-world connector — how these simple stories crush products and companies.

When trying to do things well and do things right at the same time, you live in a constant state of compromise. There is no such thing as elegant enough or built well enough. A product or feature is either built elegantly or it’s not. It’s binary, and that’s what most folks miss. So most of the time, any compromise results in products that aren’t quite elegant, delivered a little late and come in a bit over budget.

This is death by 1,000 cuts. So, often, compromise results in sacrifice.

When sacrificing value for elegance, you wind up missing a lot of opportunities, sometimes all the opportunities, being late to a shifting market with an over-engineered product, or missing entire segments of the market by pricing those segments out with features they don’t need. 

When sacrificing elegance for value, you’re just sacrificing the long term for the short term, delivering poor-quality results to a broad and hungry market that, post-disappointment, will never come back.  

Why Timing Is Everything

There’s a time and a place for elegance and a time and a place for value. Because every company and product is unique, there isn’t a handy chart or set of rules to determine which time is right for which concept, but experience has taught me some basic guidelines.

First, an inelegant idea is a terrible idea, whether that idea is for a business, a product, a feature or a program. You need to be all in on elegance during the ideation phase. Anyone can come up with an idea to make an existing product cheaper or better, but the difficulty in doing that well is usually why it hasn’t already been done.

Your product solves a problem. That problem is costly to the customer. Your solution either reduces or eliminates that cost. This is all the customer cares about. Elegance should be mandatory all the way from the idea to the solution. 

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The Goal: An Elegant MVP

A paradoxical problem requires a paradoxical solution. Enter the elegant minimum viable product.

A product, from its earliest stages, is the realization of the delivery of the solution, so once the solution is finalized, this is where value takes center stage. And usually even before the solution is finalized. But that value is found not in cutting corners on the solution, but cutting corners on the delivery of that solution.

Prototypes, working prototypes and even MVPs must be built quickly and cheaply so you can iterate on customer uptake, engagement and satisfaction. Elegance should be sacrificed in the builds of these things, but not in the solution itself.

There is no such thing as a perfect product. So instead of chasing that, focus everyone on building an elegant solution, then maintaining the elegance of the solution as you build value into the product. 

Now here’s the thing. I can’t tell you how to do that without learning a ton about your company, your product, your industry and your market. Then I need to learn about your customers, not only by talking to them, but by tracking what they do and why. 

And this is where a lot of product startups fail to reach the growth stage, when they don’t take the time to learn and execute and build value around an elegant solution based on their customer learnings and their own experience translating customer pain into symptoms and causes and cure.

The customer can only tell you so much. Technology and engineering can only take you so far. The business can only support so many models. Guessing at these things and perfecting the product based on guesses is an easy way to build a perfect product that no one will use.