Saying no the right way — taking things away from people while keeping them on your side — seems like it’s becoming an increasingly crucial skill. Came across three bits in the last few days that echoed this idea…
1) Marco says, “Making a product better often requires removing features.”
Dealing with the negative feedback is tough. Every feature removal, even if minor, is greeted with an initial barrage of emails from people whose lives I have just completely ruined by this change to my free website or my $5 iPhone application…It’s especially tough with web and iPhone apps, for which there’s no good way, or no way at all, for the offended customers to just keep using the old version.
But the result, once the fire has died down, is a much better product for the majority of customers.
If I could never remove features, I’d never add any.
2) A day after reading that, I heard Thomas Friedman discuss how the next generation of political leaders will need to focus on taking things away from voters.
We’re entering an era where being in politics is gonna be, more than anything else, about taking things away from people.
You think it’s tough removing a feature from an iPhone app? Try being a politician that takes away a group’s pet entitlement program.
3) And here’s environmentalist Yvon Chouinard in the trailer for 180south (synopsis):
The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life. It’s so easy to make it complex. The solution for a lot of the world’s problems may be to turn around and take a forward step. You can’t just keep trying to make a flawed system work.
Merle
on 20 May 10So why did the feature ever go IN in the first place?
joelarson
on 20 May 10The Charlie Rose show really needs to take away their horrible 80s smooth jazz TV theme song, guh!
Otherwise, totally agree: reduce, simplify, streamline, take out the trash!
Cameron Watters
on 20 May 10Politicians have been taking things away in the forms of taxation and restricted liberties since the ink dried on the U.S. Constitution.
Any belief that politicians have ever “given” anything to people is born out of either a) a poor understanding of our government or b) an incredible PR victory for politicians.
Hibiscus
on 20 May 10I think people who say, “Keep it simple” sometimes aren’t taking into account how hard it is to get something to be simple in the first place.
For example, the “Microsoft Designs the iPod Packaging” video has been shown to us many times in company meetings:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0
But the presenters never mention that the iPod package probably started life looking like Microsoft version, and the Apple team probably then had to make some hard choices about what to leave out.
David Andersen
on 20 May 10“Try being a politician that takes away a group’s pet entitlement program.”
Most of them can do this, but only if it’s not the pet entitlement program of one of theirpet constituencies. Also, by nature, pols love to ‘give’ (are you really giving when it’s some other person’s resource? [Hear, hear Cameron]) things in exchange for power and prestige.
jd
on 20 May 10In general I think it’s wise to be judicious in leaving things out in the first place. But I can see some benefits to rolling out a lot of features and seeing which resonate “out in the wild”. But you have to be prepared to edit as necessary.
I don’t think it’s quite as hard as many believe. I think people get a little too hung up on the loud minority.
Anonymous Coward
on 20 May 10Politicians have been taking things away in the forms of taxation and restricted liberties since the ink dried on the U.S. Constitution.
Great point.
Thomas
on 20 May 10Politicians are an elected body of representatives. It isn’t their responsibility to take or give, it is their responsibility to represent the people. I’d like to say that the upcoming generations will participate in taking things away, but this is reflective of the spirit of the American people and its original founding intentions.
Mark
on 20 May 10That, quite frankly, is the scariest thing I’ve read in quite a while. In fact, that kind of exercise by our politicians does anything but simplify.
Thomas Carney
on 20 May 10By the way, Hulu only works in the USA. If you want to see the Thomas Friedman interview go to http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8649
Damn right restrictions suck!
Thomas Carney
on 20 May 10Sorry http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11012
David Andersen
on 20 May 10@Mark – pretty sure (I hope) he’s referring to run away entitlements and subsidies, not freedoms.
Tony Brice
on 20 May 10Excellent! A great example is what’s happening with Enterprise communities (like cubeless). It seemed logical that we’d include things straight from social media on the Internet and it would work in a private, secure corporate community. Most does, some doesn’t… either isn’t needed or needs to be fundamentally different. You do, you learn, you redo!
Mark
on 20 May 10@David Andersen—I’d love to see how you realistically separate the two. The giving and taking away of entitlements and subsides always has either a positive or a negative cascading affect on those, mostly un-entitled individuals, who’s freedoms (and livelihood) depend on it.
Jack
on 20 May 10Only one person in politics today has consistently been doing this already… should we expect a Ron Paul 2012 endorsement anytime soon? :-)
David Andersen
on 20 May 10Mark, how is a farmer more free because part or most of his livelihood depends on the whims of politicians and bureaucrats? Government is not here (or should not be) to GRANT us freedoms, but to protect them. That’s the US Constitutional vision anyway. I say vision because it’s less and less the actual law of the land. No one becomes freer when some capricious 3rd-party takes from one entity and gives it to another.
Mark
on 20 May 10Exactly. And that’s why the whole “take things away from people” statement is so dangerous, because that’s exactly what will happen.
David Andersen
on 21 May 10Understood, but I think the point of the comment is that the US (and most of the world) is becoming so mired in entitlements that can’t be financed by debt and real productivity that pols will eventually start having to take them away. Now personally I think they are mostly gutless wonders and it will take a monumental crisis for anything to change. It won’t be this crop of pols to do anything. All that said, the real problem is with the electorate, not the pols.
David R
on 21 May 10This is off-topic and inflammatory, but it’s mostly a message to 37s—you guys are WAY smarter than to be quoting Thomas Friedman as an authority on anything. Or to put his video on svn, such an embarrassment.
You remember that he was the asshole who said the war was about telling iraquis to “suck. on. this.”?
For more details, you can google “thomas friedman moron”, or see these select bits:
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/05/30/five-years-ago-today-thomas-friedman-said-the-iraq-war-was-about-telling-the-middle-east-to-suck-on-this/
http://exiledonline.com/thomas-friedman-the-empires-useful-idiot-an-exile-classic/
http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html
Tamer Salama
on 21 May 10What is this guy – Friedman – doing on SVN ?!!
Chris Cavallucci
on 21 May 10It might be useful to consider Kaizen principles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
To eliminate the wasteful is both art and science.
Jake J
on 21 May 10It doesn’t matter what else Thomas Friedman has said. He’s on SVN because his point here is valid and it is a good example of what 37signals often says—that it is harder to take something away when it has already been added, but sometimes that is what needs to be done.
No business could stay in business by operating like the US and many other governments do nowadays—spending more than they take in and operating with so much waste. It’s absurd to think that a government could continue that way for long without serious consequences.
In business and government and software, sometimes the best and sometimes the only viable option is to take things away. It’s hard to do and people will resist, but a responsible businessman or politician has to have the guts to do it.
Jason
on 22 May 10You lost me at the Thomas Friedman cite.
Jason
on 22 May 10Jake.
The OP’s unnecessary defense of a product design truism should probably not include the tortured rationalization of why the poor people can piss off by a perpetually wrong war monger rich white guy defending his unearned privilege.
Just saying.
Anonymous Coward
on 23 May 10It’s amazing that we still paint our government (isn’t our government US?) as the boogie man when we’ve just witnessed a decade of financial and environmental disasters resulting from unregulated and deregulated industry in American business (Enron’s rolling “blackouts” and tripling of energy prices), financial industry, Katrina, Gulf oil spill). Complete hands-off government led to a decade of arbitrage deals and outright corruption. I think instead of blaming government we should ask how can we make government better? You can’t have all the great Constitutional freedoms you speak so fondly of without a strong, vibrant government to make them valid. They mean nothing without government. Let’s remember that the Bush administration began the first $800 Billion financial industry bailout in April 2008 (where was the Tea Party then?). And it was the Bush administration that vehemently fought against expensive oil industry safety measures for rigs in the Gulf of Mexico (it seemed foolish to think of paying an extra $500,000 for better extra equipment; now this will wind up costing taxpayers untold amounts of treasure as the government spends inordinate amounts of time trying to fix it… a common theme these days as we run around cleaning up problems them stem from businesses that go unregulated and “set free” by the Right). Taxes are only evil if they are forced (but there IS representation…the Tea Party premise makes no sense…big surprise). And with regard to taxes, I thought the Right believes “freedom isn’t free”? or does that only apply to the sacrifices out soldiers and Marines make? Bush borrowed $1 Trillion from China to fund the Iraq War (this is called deficit-spending, a socialist practice) so that he could pretend that Republicans don’t raise taxes. So with regard to this post: sometimes “simple and easy” includes enough oversight and tools to ensure that things actually run as promised. If we can accomplish this …in software apps or in government … then by all means trim away what need trimming to allow for a cleaner interface and smoother operation.
Mark
on 23 May 10Sorry: the last post was me…hit the Post button too quickly and forgot to identify myself.
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Jake J
on 24 May 10@Jason – I get that the product design principle doesn’t need to be defended, but the author was merely pointing out other areas where the principle was applied that he came across in his life. I liked the point.
@Mark – I don’t know what in the conversation prompted all that. You seem to be just hurling as much as you can at Republicans. Bush made some huge mistakes overspending, bailing out companies and borrowing from China. And now Obama is making all the same mistakes, only bigger. I wouldn’t invest in a company run by either of them.
I work in an industry where over the last five years or so government regulation has been increasing a lot. It has lead to increased safety, but has also lead to severe over-complication, waste and unintentional loop-holes and problems. Sometimes the unforeseen problems created by the regulations are bigger than the problems they intended to fix. The problem is that there isn’t any natural force to keep the government regulations in check. How do you make sure that what needs to be trimmed gets trimmed away when there is nothing to keep government bloat in check?
This discussion is closed.