Why Products Suck #8: Starvation of Resources

Part VIII in an ongoing series of Why Products Suck (and what we can do about it).

For the most part, those who design and build products want them to be good. They want people to buy and use them. They want them to be enjoyed and maybe even win an award or two. They want to make money and be successful. But they are constrained (or seemingly constrained) by time, money, personnel. Resources, in other words. Too few resources can choke an otherwise promising product.

Without enough time, the product team won’t be able to do enough iteration or testing. Without enough money, products can be shoddily made out of cheap materials or not have enough infrastructure to work properly. Without enough of the right kind of manpower, products might be made poorly and/or slowly.

Of course, all products are going to have constraints. No project has unlimited time, money, and people…and nor would you even want them to. (In another post, I’ll talk about having too many resources.) “Design depends largely on constraints,” as Charles Eames reminds us. But it is the deliberate withholding or poor allocation of resources that can cripple a product.

Sometimes organizations can forget that their role is not simply to perpetuate the organization, but to create or refine products (and/or services) that people will buy and use. And their best efforts (read: resources) should be directed at this task.

Often some of these constraints are false ones. “We have to get this product out by Q2.” “Why?” “Because it’s on the spreadsheet.” The trick is to figure out which constraints are the serious, immovable ones and which ones are arbitrary. Of course, it is important to get the product launched during its window of opportunity, but it might not be important to get an inferior product out in time for a small trade show. An accurate assessment of what the market window really is will help.

You can ensure you get the proper resources by demonstrating (with numbers and metrics if you must) the proper importance of the project to the organization. Of course, that means you too must come to terms with what its proper importance is; after running the numbers, you might realize it isn’t nearly as high-priority as you thought.

Without enough resources, even if the product does launch, there might not be enough organizational support to really maintain and support the product once it’s on the market. And that too will make the product suck.

This was written by Dan Saffer. Posted on Tuesday, October 20, 2009, at 9:21 pm. Filed under Why Products Suck. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.