{"id":140,"date":"2009-01-23T20:36:27","date_gmt":"2009-01-24T00:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/2009\/01\/23\/simplify-your-product\/"},"modified":"2009-01-23T20:36:27","modified_gmt":"2009-01-24T00:36:27","slug":"simplify-your-product","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/simplify-your-product\/","title":{"rendered":"Simplify your product!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I thought Matt Burns&#8217;s article about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crunchgear.com\/2009\/01\/22\/apples-success-solution-a-simple-product-line\/\">Apple&#8217;s relatively simple product line<\/a> struck a chord:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Garmin makes 82 GPS units that can be mounted in a car or carried in your hand. 82!?! That\u2019s a lot and includes 27 designed specifically for the car. If Apple made a GPS, there would be two models available &#8211; maybe only one. Apple would shove everything they could into this one GPS and sell it at a profit instead of making similar different models that feature slightly different specs.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I can relate, because I recently bought a Garmin GPS, but first had to wade through model-feature-comparison-hell.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a lesson here that many product managers miss:\u00a0 fewer choices is frequently the better design.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Does Garmin really need two models, identical in all respects except Bluetooth support?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Does every Windows install really need to ask what directory to use for installation?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Does my PC wireless configuration really need to ask me a bunch of questions about what network to use?\u00a0 Why doesn&#8217;t it just find the strongest, test for openness, and use that one? (but let me change it later if I want)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you&#8217;re a product manager:\u00a0 SIMPLIFY!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I thought Matt Burns&#8217;s article about Apple&#8217;s relatively simple product line struck a chord: Garmin makes 82 GPS units that can be mounted in a car or carried in your hand. 82!?! That\u2019s a lot and includes 27 designed specifically &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/simplify-your-product\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}