We, humans, seem to be wired with the notion that more is best.
Countries keep comparing their GDP (Gross Domestic Product). World stock exchanges are obsessed with growth, and businesses always want to offer more to their customers.
Yet, despite our natural tendency to add more to solve challenges, we’ve seen the rise of the “less is more” movement over the past years.
By choice or necessity, we’ve started to realize that growth at all costs wasn’t doing any good to our planet and was solving problems for just a minority.
Less can be liberating. By removing the unnecessary, it brings clarity.
Michelangelo himself realized that he created the perfect sculpture by removing stone from the marble block, not adding some.
But less is tough! It still is counterintuitive for most. It’s struggling to find its place in a world of “more.”
Product teams are not immune from this dilemma of what is best for their audiences. We try hard to understand customer problems and solve a maximum to delight them and beat the competition.
We end up building confusing interfaces, adding too many functions, and defeating the purpose of solving the most significant problems.
So, how can we sort it out? Let me share a few things I’ve learned from experience – I mean from my past mistakes!
1 – Continuously discover what’s on your customers’ minds. Talk to them, have them express their most profound problems. Dig into why they’re facing such issues and how unbearable the pain is.
2 – Continuously prioritize which customer problems you’ll want to address. You have a vision. You have unique competencies. Make sure you use these to filter what you will and, most notably, what you won’t be solving.
3 – As you build your product, identify the two key benefits it brings that will help it stand out versus anyone else. Organize your product design, positioning, messaging around these two dimensions.
You get it! Relentlessly identify and prioritize which problems you won’t solve, and narrow down your solution to a couple of core benefits you bring.
By consistently doing so, you’ll bring clarity to your offering and increase your chances of success.
So, yes, smarter less is more!