Skimming the Fat from Your Product

When I first started building Ignitious, I thought I had a pretty slimed down Minimal Viable Product. Users would be able to create accounts, add repositories to be tracked, manage those repositories, review code.

This was completely wrong.

I spent a ton of time architecting how the system would manage repositories. While this feature does add business value, it isn’t unique, it offers no competitive advantage over other code review tools. My time would have been much better spent polishing the actual review process.

In hindsight, I should have only allowed for single files to be reviewed, either by uploading or copy paste. This would have let me focus on the review process, and add repositories later down the road. The application would have ended up being the same (more or less), it just would have arrived on a different path. Hindsight is always 20/20 though, right? It's obviously too late for this product, but I think it was a very important lesson to learn first hand.

It's far too easy to fall in love with features, blinding you to what is necessary and what is fat. Next time you find yourself spending a lot of time on a feature, ask yourself, does this add business value? Does this give me a competitive advantage? If not, skim it. You can always add the feature later in the product life cycle, but leave it out of the initial version. You'll be better off.

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