The 1969 Experiment In 1969, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo parked a car in a rough neighborhood in the Bronx and left the hood open. Within 10 minutes, it was stripped for parts. Then, he parked a pristine car in a wealthy neighborhood in Palo Alto. It sat untouched for a week. **Then, Zimbardo took a hammer and smashed one window of the Palo Alto car.**Within hours, the wealthy neighbors tore the car apart. ...
The Complexity Creep Open Microsoft Word. Look at the toolbar. How many of those hundreds of icons have you clicked in the last year? Maybe 10? Now open Google Docs. It has perhaps 20% of Word’s features, yet it dominates collaboration. Why? Because it suffers less from Feature Bloat. Bloat happens slowly. No PM wakes up and says, “Let’s make our product confusing today.” It happens one rational decision at a time. ...
The Siren Song of the Enterprise Deal In the early stages of a B2B startup, revenue is oxygen. When a massive enterprise client (a bank, a telco, a government agency) shows interest, it is intoxicating. It validates your existence. But these “Elephants” or “Whales” rarely buy off-the-rack. They demand tailoring. “We need this specific report format.” “We need an on-premise deployment option.” “We need this button to be blue, not green.” ...