Stop Validating and Start Co-Creating
producttalk.org
producttalk.org
Pretty good advice for any creative engineering discipline.
The hard part is always defining “overengineered”. Is 1 day of design work enough? Is 2 weeks too much? Good taste and experience rule here, and the best engineers make the right decisions, leading to great products. Problem is, it’s hard to define what makes someone good at this- though it’s incredibly important for product success.
Software design is still a very creative endeavor and probably always will be.
But, I also think why Apple did not do it with iPhone? They could have just built a device with phone only capabilities. Leaving aside that, they rebuilt\redesigned a ready-to-market iPhone (first version)
It's also not as good feedback - it's too easy to tell the focus group what to think. But done right, it can lead to the same place.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr http://www.ubergizmo.com/2005/09/official-apple-motorola-and...
iPhone was an MVP by any reasonable definition IMO. It was a 2G device and the build quality was meh if memory serves me well, it was slow, it lacked memory, the camera was trash, it didn't support 3rd party apps, it was expensive, it only worked on AT&T, etc. But it took off regardless because it was good enough.
Rather, the article is saying: you don’t even know what is good yet, so stop wasting time trying to perfect what you are likely to need to replace anyway.