I spend a decent amount of time thinking about what makes a good product (after all, I am a product manager!). The answer to this is obviously very subjective to the person, but my take is that a good product is not necessarily the most polished or feature rich product out there, but its the one that makes you achieve something quickly, and then gets out of the way. You dont think about it. You don’t need it. You don’t keep wondering if you missed something by not using it enough. But you know thats the product you use if you want to do something specific.
I dont claim to have launched products that are used by billions of people, and frankly at this point in career I am not sure I want to either. I dont find joy in solving for scale, which is very weird coming from me who works at a place where everything is in fact about scale. My problem with scale it biases everything. At a scale of 100s of millions of users you can make a good faith argument to build a feature just because, and you will find enough people to give you data to validate that decision. But just because you can, even with data backing it, doesn’t mean you should in fact build it.
Building truly great products is not about saying no all the time, but really deciding when is it just enough to not build any more. That simplicity of imagination is what let Jobs/Ive build the first unibody MacBook Pro. I do not think Apple has built a more perfect device in its history. Everything about that product/device was just perfect, inside and out. I’ve watched the intro video to its design countless times marveling at how it just got everything right all at once. Everything else that has followed that design has only made it either more complicated, less featurefull and everything in between, but nothing has come close to the perfection of that particular product. And then, just like everyone else, Apple fell victim to scale.
Anyhow, I am glad I am right now working on product that is not the most shiny object in town, but I know that when its out, it will be enough to get the people we are looking achieve the things we want them to achieve - it has no pretty Ux, no snazzy features, nothing to drive engagement - but it will work. And sooner or later in 3 years the product is going to be a feature ridden gunk anyway, so I am going to savor its release when it happens!