The Scary Version

Say you’re launching a new piece of software. You’re thinking of all the quality variables you can optimize for.

You optimize for the quality of the visuals, the edge cases, the robustness to a variety of uses. It should be like this, it should do that. It has to accommodate users like these. It has to have more features.

“These features will help me sell this thing.”

“The quality alone will get people to turn heads.”

Maybe.

And then there are some constraints. You’re constrained by time, by money. You have to sync up your ambitions with reality. You have to ship.

“Surely there’s a version of this that’s worth shipping.”

You’ve found the version you can ship. You have the budget to pull it off, you know some areas are going to take longer, and so you know the scopes that can be cut. You know the minimum quality you’re going to accept. You’re set.

After this whole exercise is done, after your plan is clear, after you’ve shaped a version that you think is going to do the job, there’s one more variable I think you should consider.

I think you should consider the scary version.

The scary version is the one for which you’re a little petrified. With your initial exercise, you got to the edge of what is acceptable. Now to get to the scary version, you pushed the edge a little further. It caused you to doubt. It caused you to feel destabilized. It caused you to have mental pushback.

To get your inner thoughts to go a little on the defensive, what change can you make, what feature should you drop, which twist can you try?

Consider dropping a table-stakes feature in favour of a goofy idea.

Consider adding a non-scalable service offering to your app, something that pairs well with the app and adds more value to the buyer.

Consider pulling off a marketing ploy that’s out of the ordinary.

Consider what it would be like if you went overboard on one feature and dropped all others from v1.

Consider cranking up the statement your app is making on the rest of the industry.

What you’re looking for is the inner dialogue to go a little like this. “Surely you’re going to get bad publicity for this. If you try it out, you’ll get ridiculed. People you respect will discourage you from doing this.”

The thing is that nobody, very few of us, take the scary road. If you try it out, however, you might get outsized attention. This very work you did to dare the scary version might pay off with a bunch of new fans. Hardly anyone dares the scary version. But you will, and that will cause a stir, all because you dared to listen to the stir within you and said “yeah, let’s do that instead.”