\n\t\t Entrepreneur \t<\/p>\n
One of the most important lessons I\u2019ve learned in my career is not to mistake complexity for sophistication.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always been a tinkerer. Before I ran PhoneBurner, my current company that streamlines dialing for outbound teams, I used to stay up until the small hours of the morning in my home workshop just trying to build things from scratch. Back then, I wasn\u2019t even sure I wanted tech to be my career. I just knew I was interested in creating things that solved problems.<\/p>\n
Some of the things I created ended up being pretty useful. One was an app that sat on top of CRM systems to help users visualize data more easily. Today, user-friendly reporting features are a de facto requirement for this kind of software, but that wasn\u2019t always the case. It used to be that you needed deep technical knowledge to parse the info CRMs collected.<\/p>\n
Of course, that also meant fewer people were able to use them. A decade ago, when CRMs were less user-friendly, the global market was worth just over $26 billion. By contrast, most current estimates put it at over $100 billion.<\/p>\n
My point is: The best solution isn\u2019t always the most feature-rich one. It\u2019s the one that democratizes access to the most valuable features, so more people can use them.<\/p>\n
Related: Your Product\u2019s Design Could Be Costing You Customers. Here\u2019s What You\u2019re Doing Wrong (and How to Fix It).<\/b><\/p>\nWhy founders overengineer<\/h2>\n
As a founder, you probably know your core product better than most, and you want it to impress others. But either of these factors can make you lose perspective.<\/p>\n
When you\u2019re too close to your product, you become a perfectionist. Even rare or outlying problems feel critically important. When you focus too much on earning acclaim from industry peers or investors, you end up designing needlessly complicated systems. In both cases, the same thing happens: You end up focused on edge cases instead of the customer\u2019s essential needs.<\/p>\n
Often, founders who make these mistakes assume that more capability automatically translates into more value. But that isn\u2019t always true. In fact, focusing too much on edge cases is more likely to compromise the core of your product.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a story that in the 1970s and 80s, the former Soviet Union commissioned the nation\u2019s top electrical engineers to design electric guitars rather than import them from the West. The guys in charge of the project were brilliant, but they weren\u2019t musicians. So they weren\u2019t thinking about features that improved playability; they were thinking about how impressive it would be to stuff each guitar full of experimental electronics.<\/p>\n
The results were technically impressive and looked like nothing else being made at the time. They also played terribly. In setting out to impress party bosses and push the limits of engineering, the designers had ignored what makes a guitar valuable in the first place.<\/p>\n
Related: 6 Reasons Your Perfect Product Isn\u2019t Selling \u2014 and How to Avoid the Marketing Mistakes Behind Them<\/b><\/p>\nHow to spot the early warning signs that your product is overengineered<\/h2>\n
So now that you know why people tend to overengineer, how can you stop yourself from doing it? In my career, I\u2019ve come across a few clear signals that you might be overcomplicating your solution:<\/p>\n
You keep adding just one more feature to close a hypothetical gap, but it never feels finished. The more you add, the more you notice that appears to be missing. In reality, you may just be moving the goalposts.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
You need to educate your own team extensively before they feel enabled to sell what you\u2019ve designed. If it\u2019s not intuitive to them, it probably won\u2019t be intuitive to customers.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
You\u2019re designing for the exceptions, not the 80% of users or use cases that are more common.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
Your MVP feels more like a platform than a product. A versatile solution is valuable, but an unfocused one isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
It might seem like this whole article is just an argument for simplicity, but that\u2019s not actually what I\u2019m saying. You can still develop a powerful and broadly useful product that manages to avoid being overengineered.<\/p>\n
This is not necessarily about removing functionality. You just need to focus on making your product accessible and user-friendly. Here\u2019s what a comprehensive solution can and should do when it\u2019s designed carefully:<\/p>\n
A comprehensive solution hides its complexity behind intuitive UX. For example, PhoneBurner, the power dialing platform I run for outbound calling teams, uses programmable disposition buttons to help users streamline complex follow-up tasks after calls and create more efficient workflows.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
A comprehensive solution also expands the user base from technical specialists to everyday operators. My app for CRM systems helped make it so that you no longer needed to be a statistician to interpret the data from your software. We\u2019ve since carried the same philosophy into PhoneBurner with intuitive real-time reporting that anyone on a sales team can understand at a glance.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
Above all, a comprehensive solution takes a difficult problem and makes the solution feel easy. For example, calling more prospects shouldn\u2019t require you to master a brand new system, which is why it was important to lower the barrier to entry for our dialing platform and make sure new users could be up and running with a free trial in minutes.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
So yes: Sophisticated things can be complicated, but complicated things aren\u2019t necessarily sophisticated. Maybe that\u2019s also why some of the most concise advice I\u2019ve been given in my life has also felt the most profound \u2014 see the link at the end of this article for more on that subject.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, there\u2019s little value in window dressing for its own sake. But the solutions that appear simplest from the outside are often surprisingly elegant when you take the time to understand where they come from. That elegance, and the intent behind it, are usually what make the difference between a comprehensive solution and a complicated one.<\/p>\n
Related: The 1 Question I Ask Every Successful Person I Meet \u2014 and How It\u2019s Changed My Life<\/b><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n