Yes, this is a pretty straight forward statement, however, as a business you need to be extremely disciplined in order to constantly keep things simple.
Personally I like to equate simplicity with perfection and the following quote sums up my general thinking with regards to simplicity.
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I have spent my career building product based businesses and it is all too easy when you have a team of talented product managers and developers to come up with all manner of features that they feel customers need.
Once a feature has been suggested – and in some cases even partially/fully developed – it is very difficult to imagine the product without it.
The problem can quickly escape when you start talking to customers. In general teams I have found that the customers who love to provide feedback and ideas are at the “power user” end of the scale, and therefore they amplify and reinforce the feeling regarding the need for a feature.
The problem lies in the fact that these power-users (and your own staff basically fall in the same category) represent the absolute minority of users. Catering to their every need, wish and whim means that very quickly you have a complex product. Yes it may be extremely powerful, but it has now become difficult for new and less power users to use.
The real art of keep things simple doesn’t have to mean reducing these power user features, but can also be dealt with in different way from creating a very well crafted UI that only exposes complex functions when needed through to creating different versions of the same product with different (extended) feature sets.
Keeping it simple doesn’t only apply to products and features but is important in all aspects of business.
In this article I outlined the changes to our pricing that changed the adoption rate of ARCHICADselect from around 15% to virtually 100%. By looking at our pricing model and adjusting it to make it more easily understood we found we were able to present the price to new and existing customers in an easily understood manner which led to a massive improvement to our business.
Some people love to come up with Complex Pricing Schemes in order to cater for every option with a sense that by doing so they will maximise their margin. However, if an internal sales person can’t understand a pricing matrix then it is a big clue that your potential customers won’t, or they will look for the easiest option that satisfies their needs.
In the same way when we launched Cadimage Tools on Subscription we could have provided a whole host of options to allow customers to pick and choose. However, we decided even with 7 individual tools that packaging them in three plans made the most sense. Some would argue we left money on the table, but I believe we attracted most customers at a higher price point then we would have had we given them infinite options. It can be counter-intuitive, but sometimes sacrificing apparent margin in order to keep things simple actually ends up being far more profitable.
As I said at the start, it requires discipline to always keep things simple and its all to easy to get carried away internally with grand (complex) ideas. Remember to ask yourself:
Is there anything I can remove from this without materially affecting it
And bring a sense of simplicity to all aspects of your business.