Less is more.

Everyone says this. It’s now a cliche. OK. But it bears repeating, and understanding.

One of the secret advantages of making software in these modern times is the ability to ship that software to real customers early and often. Those users are a treasure trove of explicit and implicit feedback helping you find your way through the opaque box that is the software product development process. You can listen to their compliments and complaints as well as watch how they actually do and don’t use the product. And you get to constantly refine your plans as a result.

But… there is one thing that can get in your way — not shipping often enough. Not shipping is kryptonite to making customer feedback a regular part of your process. We often say that constraints force creativity. Constraints also force clarity.

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” –Mark Twain

Your job as the product design leader is the find the one thing — the single thing your product needs to do well. Some people call it the minimal viable product. Some people call it your main scenario. Call it what you like, but it is the one thing you will deliver in v1. And within that scenario you will further constrain your investment to the fewest components that make your delivery distinctive.

It is common for technology product professionals to fret over not having enough features. “If features 1-3 don’t get everyone excited, shouldn’t we add features 4 and 5?” It’s human nature to want to maximize your chances for success. The thinking goes as follows: the more stuff you put in there, the more opportunity you have to resonate with a customer. But this model breaks down quickly. Think of the delicious and unassuming pizza. Let’s keep it simple and just put pepperoni on it. But what about people who don’t like pepperoni? Let’s add anchovies. And for vegetarians? How about pineapple! Do we need to ask how many people will want a pepperoni/anchovy/pineapple pizza? Some maybe, but not many.

But even worse than turning off your customers with things they don’t need or want is the distraction you provide from the core of what you are. If you’re going to make an incredible pizza — certainly a crowded market — you better make sure your simple cheese pizza is out of this world. No toppings necessary to make it clear that your pizza beats every other pizzeria in town. If you can’t create that baseline and make an impression, then you’ve already failed and no amount of toppings will save the day. In fact, the toppings just add confusion and distraction from your identity and your core value.

And let’s say that your base pizza was in fact amazing, but your anchovies were subpar. The more complexity you added to your pizza, the harder it is to discern what people liked and didn’t like. While the anchovies were the issue we might think it was the pepperoni, or the pineapple, the sauce, the cheese, the crust, etc. Teasing apart the whys and wherefores of customers’ negative (and positive) reactions can be challenging. The simpler you keep it the better.

And finally, what if you had to invest in a new slicer to get your pepperoni just the right thickness, but it turns out that your customers don’t like pepperoni. (Unlikely we know, but go with it.) Turns out you didn’t just cloud your customers impression of your product, but you now have infrastructure investments and cost sunk into functionality that you really didn’t need in the first place.

Find the one thing. Do it well. And then, with each successive release you get to add little bits here and there and see how customers respond. Maybe this week we’ll do a sausage special. If it sells well, maybe we’ll incorporate it into the permanent rotation. If the sausage required special infrastructure, maybe we’ll do it manually to start because we’re not sure it’s gonna be a hit. Once it’s a hit we can invest in the special sausage-making equipment. You get the idea.

In addition to learning about delivering less to your customers you’ve now also learned a bonus lesson: pizza analogies are almost always useful in illustrating important concepts.