German Strawberries and Product Bloat

This is a story about strawberries with an analogy to product bloat. I love strawberries. While I was at ISC 2013 today, I purchased a carton of strawberries at a local farmer’s market (see pic below). They were small, tasty, and perfect.

The strawberries at home are much bigger and often suspiciously tasteless. In searching around, we came across an NPR article that explains how you can optimize for many traits in strawberry growing and optimizing for one trait often diminishes another. For instance, if you make a strawberry bigger (this is done by breeding strawberries over time), then it is cheaper to harvest them and the cost per carton goes down. However, the taste suffers too.

The analogy to product management is similar. You can optimize for different product traits and it’s often a balancing act. Utility, capability, and features may trade off with simplicity, ease-of-use, and elegance. I believe some products, like WebEx and Salesforce.com, suffer from being too complex with features blocking ease-of-use.

Functionality is important in products, but great product managers and developers can figure out ways to introduce more complex features in a natural progression making them available when needed and hidden otherwise.

In the case of strawberries, bigger is not better in our opinion. I like tasty strawberries.

How do you avoid product bloat? How do you ensure simplicity in your products?

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