Disruptions

I have spent a fair amount of time in the last few days talking about disruptions. The core of the thinking here is not mine. The concept of disruptive technology was championed by Clayton Christensen, and has become somewhat old hat in tech circles. But its funny how sometimes we need to hear things we already know to keep us focused. And such has been the case for me in the last week.

I am always trying to think of disruptive stuff. I think the best definition of a disruptive product is when in many or most respects it sucks when measured in terms of quantity of features, when compared to incumbent products. But because it does one single thing so much better than the existing products, or because its metaphor is so powerful, you are willing to forgive its poor showing in raw feature wars.

This disruptive nature is critical to most new products that have incumbent competition, since it is unlikely you are going to be able to "catch up" to an already successful well funded company. Of course the kind of disruptions that Christensen talks about, like the change from horses to automobiles or telegraphs to telephones, are truly massive, and none of us should hold our breath waiting for that scale of disruptive invention.

And while the large-scale disruptions are unlikely I think the theory still holds writ small. One might think of them as "mini disruptions."

I say all this because it is easy to think in terms of whether or not a new product will stack up against an existing product in the marketplace. But this is not really the question. You really have to ask yourself whether the product you are developing will in some way, change the way people look at that kind of product.

A good example of this is Google Docs. Google will *never* have a more featureful office suite that Microsoft. But they do one thing much better than Microsoft, which is collaboration. If you want to work with someone else on a document, or share it with others, Docs is great and Office blows. Oh and Google Docs being free doesn’t hurt either.

I have been focused on this because there is a natural tendency in product development to start saying, "oh we need to add feature X because product Y which we will compete with has that too". And of course feature X is one of hundreds of features that product Y has that we won't have at launch.

And so you have to keep asking yourself, if I don't have this feature or that feature, but I have this other set of features that product Y will likely never have, is that an exciting product. Of course the answer is, it all depends. But this is the question that you need to keep asking yourself, because it is unlikely that you as a new company can win the feature war with a traditional ground campaign.

Bringing this back to me specifically, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to position our product initially. Is it as disruptive as we think it is? Will people get the paradigm shift? Will the consumer facing aspects be simple enough to get and yet radical enough to be exciting? Of course we don't know the answer to any of that for sure. But the one question I will definitively not be asking is if we have enough features. Because if the core concept is not appealing, features won't matter. And if it is, they won't matter either.