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while working on our startup [1] this is one of the top pg quotes I like. However while talking to our customers we regularly face the "toy" critic as opposed to "feature rich". however approaching it as a toy keeps it simple , though for saas it appears as too simplistic sometimes.

[1] we offer games and puzzles as a service to serious marketing clients.

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I think it’s about time we turn “feature rich” around and start considering it a criticism rather than a compliment. So many products I’ve loved as a consumer and worked on as a developer were eventually ruined by relentless feature cram and their never being declared “done”.

Interesting. I wanted to suggest an exact opposite.

I'd love to have seen those products of yours. In the alternate universe I live in, almost all the SaaS products I see are toys, never progressing beyond MVP phase.

SaaS can not interoperate. Thus feature-poor SaaS are useless.

Could you please elaborate?

If Google Docs provides featureset A,B,C and Office 365 provides features A,B,D; you can never have both C and D at the same time.

Is this specific to SAAS? Suppose Word 2003 has A,B,D and WordPerfect has A,B,C, can you ever have C and D at the same time?

You have a single filesystem, so maybe you can open the same document in both one after another to work on the parts that need D and the parts that need C. Of course this relies on having a common format, but in the local-apps world we mostly have those, whereas in the SaaS world we don't even have a filesystem to share.

Ooh, good point. Import/export kind of does the same thing, but much worse I guess.

UNIX tools can focus on solving a single problem well because they interoperate between themselves, so you can join tools that solve different problems and make something useful out of it.

SaaS has no such option. It either does every little thing you need, or it doesn't solve the problem.

IFTT, stitch and segment are some companies that try to solve this problem.

They're ultimately limited to which SaaS lets them, which is usually not much. For many, deep interoperability goes against the core objective of "engagement" (i.e. trapping the user in the service for as long as possible).

Interesting. What's an example of deep interoperability you'd to see that isn't currently available?

SaaS products interoperate through APIs.

I have always considered this the great tragedy of APIs. Their promise is so great yet there are few ways of actually working with them outside of explicit vendor integrations that account for the idiosyncracies between most software. Noting that most SaaS is just differing UI interacting with object models, and it's a bummer that we build this way. It's like we are collectively building a rail network, but every single town uses a unique guage of rails.

Ecommerce software is about as close to okay at it as I have seen, but still vendor driven and still full of idiosyncracies. I can at least create a product in a PIM and it pipes through to all the places it needs to go once it is set up.

Agreed in general, but services like IFTTT and Zapier offer a very decent way of integrating otherwise unfriendly APIs, and I think that this will become even more straightforward and common with the rise of conversational interfaces like Alexa

Problem is, most services seem to be designed to interact in the absolute minimum. I use IFTTT myself, but just look at the integrations available! So little of them. 90% of times I have a flow idea, it can't be done with what's available.

(Come to think of it, I have a spare VPS, maybe it's time to try out Huginn.)

RE Alexa, call me a whiner, but "Alexa, ask $BrandApp to XYX" ruins the immersion a lot :(.

Ultimately, the problem is control. On-line services control both your data and how you work with it - from the flow of actions to UI[0]. An interoperable world requires vendors to give up a lot of that control.

[0] - They control the entire experience. As if they were a fucking Disneyland, not just a hammer, from users' point of view.

My point exactly. Yet it's still the dominating model these days.

Do you have any examples of some products you see as missing features? No need for particular names.

It might mean there is room for a new product in their space that can cater to power users or enterprise clients.

In my view of the world "toys" and "MVP" are orthogonal. Imagine an actual toy that is a choking hazard. There are lots on the market, and they even usually say, "choking hazard" on the packaging. The choking hazard is a potential liability that you might have been able to fix with more design work upfront and is hard to fix now that you've made a product.

MVP is a kind of overloaded term because it can mean that it lacks user features, but it can also mean that it contains technical debt that is a potential liability in the future, just like the choking hazard on a toy.

A "toy" application can have a minimum set of user functionality, but be "complete" in terms that it doesn't contain any of that future potential liability. There are some really nice "toy" applications and services that fill a really small niche and do it extremely well, without trying to tackle bigger problems. However, I wouldn't consider them to be MVP because they actually have a considerable amount of design beyond the minimum necessary to get it out the door.

Or tl;dr: "Toys" are uncomplicated, but not necessarily minimal. MVP is generally incomplete and not necessarily uncomplicated (because reducing complexity requires effort).

Given enough time, most applications turn from "feature rich" into "feature bloat."

Feature Rich: Features I use.

Feature Bloat: Features I don't use.

I would say: almost. Features I don’t use, that are just kind of there but don’t get in my way aren’t seen as bloat, only the ones that complicate my workflow in some way. For example, I find Jira bloated, because it has loads of options and menus that I must consider when I want to do something, even though I will never use 90% of them, creating an issue has a huge form to fill in, but I only care about maybe 5 or 6 of the fields. These extra features that I don’t use cause cognitive overhead and therefore I consider them bloat. The feature that doesn’t interfere or cause overhead isn’t considered bloat, even if I never use it.

I think toys have a simple/intuitive/familiar user interface (so kids can use them), are simple to create (to be purchasable for kids), and do something interesting or unexpected i.e. different which is really what makes them potentially valuable.

But, I'm not sure that all children's toys have immense commercial value (e.g. kaleidoscope). I always wonder this question for startup idea success rates: I wonder what the ratio is?

Do you have a site you can share? Sounds cool!

We're still in early beta phase - here's a quick showcase for some client here: https://partners.zestoy.com/showcase/home/ and the main website https://www.zestoy.com

Additional question - what is the value prop for clients? Why do they buy your service?

Lego's "Serious Play" is a good example of this kind of marketing done really well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Serious_Play

Agree, Lego’s Serious Play is a great set of ‘starter toolkits’ for prototyping and design thinking sessions.

Somewhat pricey (as all Lego is), but worth it for many scenarios IMHO.

Yes, those starter kits are great, but the real value in LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is the methodology.

As a trained facilitator in LSP methods and materials, I’ve seen the power of this methodology at work. It taps into emotion and gets people thinking with their hands, using more parts of their brains than they would just sitting around talking and writing.

The LSP kits are great because of the “curated” mix of LEGO® bricks they contain, specially chosen to help people build metaphors.

(And actually, if you were to assemble your own set of the same bricks “a la carte” it would be much more expensive, so though they cost a pretty penny, they’re actually a good deal.)

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