faithpeterson

What?!?

That’s right. There’s a lot of time and energy spent reviewing, ranking, estimating, assessing risk, and projecting the (business, not to say revenue) benefit of ideas and feedback. In reality most of the “things” in the list are never going to happen. When we stop managing them as if they might happen we can use our limited time, money, attention, and creativity to create truly great products.

Having or generating ideas is easy. Brainstorming generates an overflowing cornucopia of the inspired, pedestrian, useless, and harmful. The next step is often product-design-by-consensus . And that often means choosing which ideas we “like best” or that we guess or assume people (buyers, users, beneficiaries) will “like.” Sometimes an organization just wants to give the sales team something new to sell, or something to upsell current clients, like a shot of adrenaline to get the sales team excited and charged up.

Enter YAGDI. Often it's not worth storing ideas or suggestions. As soon as we decide to store them, we need a place to store them. We need to maintain them, update them, rank them,research them, analyze them, find corroborating or supporting requests for them, prioritize them, estimate them, communicate about them, create artifacts to further describe them, manage their life cycle, and archive stale ones. That overhead doesn't usually create value for anyone.

Let's face it. Many organizations only have enough capability to implement a tiny handful of significant product changes in any given year. By year 2 most stored ideas have become stale or irrelevant. If any are truly important you'll keep getting fresh signal from buyers, users, or internal customer-facing personnel like customer success managers, account managers, and sales reps.

Remember YAGDI. Resist the temptation to save ideas in case you might act on them “someday.” What uses of that effort will deliver more value? Here are some ideas.
* Create or increase delivery capacity
* Create or expand organization capability in
* User experience research and design
* Internal training
* Expand and improve user feedback in the app.
* Customer onboarding, provisioning, and support.
* Create features and tools for your implementation and support teams. This will create operational efficiencies (read: cost savings) accelerate onboarding (read: customer satisfaction and realized revenue), and reduce or improve customer support activities (read: revenue retention).
* Give your development team some breathing room to create high-quality appropriately optimized carbon-friendly software that will generate sustainable value.
an organization capability in user experience research and design, internal and external training,

In short without YAGDI an organization can entrap itself in an endless cycle of ever-expanding mediocrity. With YAGDI you can use your limited time, money, attention, and creativity to move your product and organization from good to great.