When two or more feature requests were solved with a single solution

March 7, 2017 2:04 PM

Share stories about software or physical products, when multiple problems or multiple feature requests were solved with a single solution rather than merely implementing the requested features .verbatim

Examples can be from well known companies/products or from your own personal experience. If from personal experience, did you validate that the problems affected more users? If so, how? What was learned along the way?

posted by purefusion to Technology (4 answers total)

In my greybeard career in software, this happens all the time. If you take a few minutes to have a discussion to understand why a particular feature is being requested, you'll often discover that you can design a fix that addresses many problems at once. Or that some of the feature requests are just bug reports in disguise. Or on and on.

Zooming out to 10,000 feet or more, this kind of thinking is described partially by the Pareto Principle, which says roughly that 20% of any phenomenon is responsible for 80% of the effects. More from Wikipedia.

Making decisions about which features to implement, one could argue, is why Apple is successful. Building good products does not mean delivering all requested features. It means understanding why all features are requested and then making informed decisions about a balanced way to proceed.
posted by rachelpapers at 2:44 PM on March 7, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Indeed, and this is all good in theory. So I'm hunting for stories to help drive this theory home. I can't recall any clever, thought provoking examples myself. Just probing the hive to see if there are any good ones out there that I can share with teams who struggle with this.
posted by purefusion at 3:06 PM on March 7, 2017

Best answer: Try looking for examples where a general-purpose open architecture gives users the ability to develop solutions themselves, rather than depend on the product creator to add a specific new feature. I'd go as far as asserting that all successful products have a thriving ecosystem of third-party add-ons that extend functionality without requiring resources from the vendor.

I'm another greybeard, and so most of the examples I'm familiar with come from the Stone Age of software. They may seem obvious if you haven't lived through dealing with a closed world that doesn't have them:
- CSS relieved the pressure to add lots of new special-purpose HTML tags
- Excel macros
- Plugins in browsers, Photoshop, etc.
- Does anyone remember what Facebook was like before they launched their API?
- In the hardware world: USB replaced a world where you had to install a driver card in your PC to add a peripheral

Also, interfaces that allow programs from different vendors to talk to each other without each one having to implement a specific interface to a specific product:
- Unix pipes relieved the pressure to add lots of switches to each command
- The clipboard in Windows and MacOS
- The "Share" feature in Android
- The Web itself: http replaced having to build interfaces into your product for a dozen different protocols, HTML replaced a dozen different formats for exchanging content
- XML, JSON
posted by fuzz at 2:12 AM on March 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks fuzz, really great examples. :)
posted by purefusion at 5:28 PM on March 15, 2017