Finding Bedrock

Most companies do very careful planning and thinking on the financial and operational side of the business. On the product side, they imagine that using feature lists is equally rigorous planning, but it is emphatically not. Software development is simply too hard, too expensive, and too difficult to do without careful planning and thinking. In the context of software development, "careful planning" can only mean interaction design, which, as has been established, is quite neglected.

One of the collateral benefits of Goal-Directed design is the cast of characters: the list of specific types of users. This document offers significant help in determining how you should react to your customer's demands for features. You first assess which user persona the new feature would service, and then decide whether or not it is one of your primary personas. If it is, you can seriously consider it. If it is not, you will drop another step farther back from the leading edge, regardless how much money you will get. If a customer walked into your office and offered you $100,000 to throw out your accounting system or set fire to your filing cabinets, would you do it?

Knowing Where to Cut

When a company is customer driven, this is a clear symptom that the product managers believe in the myth of the unpredictable market. They really don't know whether or not a feature is good or bad, necessary or unnecessary. They turn control over to the customer because, well, why not? They certainly don't know. If the customer says, "Add a left-handed monkey-wrench feature," the product manager figures the customer must know something. The manager believes that it might be the magic feature that will make the product a big success.

The flip side of this is that the product manager doesn't have a clue about what features to cut either. When external forces constrict the schedule, the manager has to cut features, but he has no idea which features are vital and which are mere gravy.

Letting nondesigners cut features is like letting anyone cut wires in an airplane. The cutting is random, or based on some unrelated quality such as the color of the insulation or the distance from your seat you might or might not cut important wires. One moment you are disabling the reading light in seat 22A, and the next moment the engines quit. But letting designers cut features is like letting the airplane's designer cut wires: He will avoid the ones that are needed for flight and disable all of the nonessential equipment first.