Other people care about this too

I found the following post on another blog, which I thought was a good reference point. It turns out that other people are talking about modularity as well. Check it out if you have a moment: Simplify your product design.

A Modularity Case Study

If you are still checking in here I commend you. I have good intentions of updating this blog more frequently than I have been, so please bear with me. My first two posts have dealt with product complexity, and I have alluded to tools that are available to circumvent some of the pitfalls of offering too many products to the market. Rather than rehash it here, I thought it would be worthwhile to link to a case example on the Society of Manufacturing Engineers' website. Modularizing the design of electronic controls.

Feature Creep

Thanks to one of the readers of this new blog I was alerted to an article on the Financial Page of The New Yorker. It addresses the topic I wrote about last week with a slightly different spin. I am not going to dive much further into the topic, but I thought it might be interesting for you to read about the idea from a more mainstream source.

I will say that the article ends with the premise that "there is no easy solution to this," which may be true, but it isn't as cut and dried as it is presented. From the last paragraph of the article I linked to above:

You can try to make simplicity into a selling point, as Philips has done with
its Sense and Simplicity campaign, or as Apple has done with the iPod. You can
stratify the market, creating different products for different skill levels (as
in the market for computer printers), although that may leave consumers
bewildered at the sheer number of choices. In theory, the best strategy would be
to make the complex simple, packaging all the power and the options consumers
think they want into a design that they’ll find easy to use.

What is missing above is a sort of happy medium. You need to think through your company strategy to determine where you want your products to fall in the market. It may be that you decide to go with a simple approach, a many products approach, or the one size fits all approach, the key is that you've evaluated the risks and benefits of each tactic. You need to spend time evaluating what your customers are basing their buying decisions on, and also how they are using the products after they leave the store. You need to find the balance between offering enough features to move your products off of the shelf, but not too many that they overwhelm your customers. A strong, well thought through product architecture can deliver the answers for your business, and can guide you to the right mix of products to satisfy your customers' needs. Only the lucky few companies stumble upon the right strategy on the first try, using a methodical approach (to create a modular structure) to define your product structure can take you much further than luck can though. Feature Creep is not a problem you have to just accept as a law of nature, it is possible to control your own destiny in regards to product complexity.