Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

Amazon recently turned on support for Amazon Sidewalk on all of their hardware in my home (convention) and decided it was fine to do this because I could opt out (configuration).<p>That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site.<p>Doing what is &quot;easy for the average user&quot; is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn&#x27;t have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.

I feel like I read something new every week on HN about design philosophy; make your product this way not that way, try to do this and not that, here&#x27;s 10 examples of products that failed because of x, here&#x27;s 5 products that were successful because of y - maybe it&#x27;s time to realise that there&#x27;s no monolithic overarching &quot;right&quot; way to design a product. This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimalist apps with flat dark designs, with mobile apps that all look the same, with products that miss killer features for the sake of simplicity, with the annoying typefaces that all tech companies use that make it &quot;trendy&quot;.

I think the tweet in the opening screenshot is simply wrong. I would argue that you almost always want paste to preserve the pasteboard formatting. Most copy&#x2F;paste is within the same document, where you obviously want the odd bolded or italicized word to retain its formatting. But you don&#x27;t notice those cases, because everything is working as expected. What you notice is that when you paste from an <i>external</i> source, the formatting is completely wrong.<p>I know that this is tangential to the point of the article, but it highlights an important point: you can&#x27;t always trust what users say they want. You need to listen to them, because their frustrations point to real problems, but finding out what the actual solution is involves more work than just taking the user&#x27;s suggestions at face value.

&gt; I will design it for the average user rather than the power user.<p>But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share?<p>I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.

If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love your product, it’s your job to understand the customers, understand the data, and build the right solution rather than building ALL the solutions.

Opinionated products are killer products when lots of people realize they share your opinion.<p>Apple banks on that. They are commonly derided by technical people for what their products don&#x27;t do, but for a lot of users, they&#x27;re happy with what the product does. Making it more capable would often make it harder for them to use.<p>Even making it configurable doesn&#x27;t make it better. Even if the options are hidden, just having it there makes users nervous. They think, &quot;Well, I could maybe make my device better, but that involves going into the no-no hell menu of billions of options&quot;. They&#x27;re literally happier to just do it the opinionated way.<p>The trick, of course, is to actually have an opinion that a lot of people share. Often, that opinion doesn&#x27;t exist. Even if it exists, you need to find it among the thousands of voices trying to tell you that they need some variant of it. It seems to require a fair bit of luck, though chance favors the prepared mind.

&gt;&gt; Opinionated products are better than flexible products.<p>But they will rub some users the wrong way, and that&#x27;s OK. In the open source CAD world you see the distinction in Solvespace vs FreeCAD. One is loved by its users as an easy, highly productive tool, if a bit odd looking. The other is regarded as more capable and feature complete - which is true - but is considered bloated, annoying, and crash-prone by users of the former.<p>There is definitely room for both approaches, or even multiple &quot;this is the one true way&quot; products. If you delight a segment of the market you&#x27;ll never be obsolete.

Dear chat clients, I never want any formatting on any pasted text, ever. Thank you. (That is destination theme matching indeed.)<p>And with respect to the Whatsapp - Signal comparison, Signal came to the stage (at least for me) when whatsapp was already huge (and also had a focus on privacy by the way!), so that comparison is unfair.<p>Other than this, I agree with the premise.

&gt; Beyond the laughs, there is a product lesson in this tweet. It is an example of a product design principle: “convention over configuration”, aka “make the easy things easy, the hard things possible”.<p>I don&#x27;t know if the author is trying to use this as an example (since you can customize the behavior) or a counterexample, but the situation describe me of pasting in Word is a bad example of this. It&#x27;s not even generally possible to paste from another word document and completely match the source formatting 100% (including stuff like text boxes) because of how pasting interacts with the terrible style system.

About a year ago I wrote a Mac application to strip formatting out of copy-pasted text. (Note: I was mostly interested in getting an application in the store as a learning exercise.)<p>In general, copying formatted text is a mess on Mac. (I haven&#x27;t tried an equivalent Windows app, although I&#x27;m primarily a Windows developer.) The problem is that many of the data structures for formatted text don&#x27;t preserve context. IE, it&#x27;s impossible to know that something is just &quot;italic,&quot; &quot;bold,&quot; or &quot;underline,&quot; because the formatting is details about how to render the fonts. IE, &quot;italic&quot; converts to kerning, &quot;bold&quot; and &quot;underline&quot; are really separate fonts.<p>In theory, I could try to infer formatting changes, and then convert to very basic HTML, but I only had about a month in between jobs to finish the app.<p>Link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;copy-cleaner&#x2F;id1521489777?mt=12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;copy-cleaner&#x2F;id1521489777?mt=1...</a>

This article made no sense. The example were unrelated to the thesis being put forward. It had nothing to do with making a killer product.

The place for opinion in your product is in its configuration. Applications need to be flexible, otherwise they are useless to anyone who doesn&#x27;t share your opinion.<p>Opinions are like estimates. The only things we can be sure of is that they are not exactly right and will likely drift over time.<p>Similar to a shortcut, opinions can be useful - but should not be a limiting factor.

Killer product is such an amorphous phrasing.<p>If the author meant best product, I agree.<p>If the author meant best selling, I&#x27;m not sure I agree.<p>MS Word needs to have all those configuration options for IT to check their boxes AND write the enterprise sized check.<p>If you are making a consumer app, this all seems like good advice. But I&#x27;m not sure it is good general advice.

It has been a long time since programs were written in a sane way: with lots of functionality so that experienced users can figure out a routine speed and become blazingly fast. Modern computing has decided to make people dumb. They like them like that, mindless drones who can only scroll and press YES. In life you get what you pay for, and right now we get users who don&#x27;t care because they don&#x27;t know, and big tech keeps feeding them more of the same.<p>When developers care more about imposing their opinions on others they have jumped to the class of people who care about power. They are the new lawyers and people should start making jokes about them being at the bottom of the sea.

Product conventions create an opinionated product; opinionated product creates user delight; user delight creates business success.

It isn’t very clear. The author says you have to create flexible products (using configuration) but down the line, be more opinionated (using convention). He lost me.

I understand where the author is coming from, and that it tends to work sometimes, blablabla, but if I saved a dollar every time an &quot;opinionated&quot; application, framework, library, or programming language appeared on Github, I would have likely saved for a slightly used Toyota by now.

My company is somehow big on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Design_thinking" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Design_thinking</a>, and I feel like the lack of product&#x2F;engineering people being opinionated is one of its main flaws.

Regarding the &quot;paste without formatting by default&quot; opinion:<p>- Pasting a body of text with multiple headlines between two documents would require using a special paste command that explicitly preserves formatting.<p>- Some benefits of &quot;convention over configuration&quot; are only present if you stick to your existing conventions. Millions of people are already used to explicitly pasting without formatting.<p>Other remarks:<p>- Opinions need to be informed by facts and customer-facing research.<p>- There is room for divergent (Yes AND) thinking, as well as convergent (Just say no) thinking in product design. See &quot;Double Diamond&quot;[1].<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Double_Diamond_(design_process_model)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Double_Diamond_(design_process...</a>

This article mix a bit of everything. There are no rules to create a killer product. That&#x27;s the whole purpose of the product management domain.<p>Regarding opinionated software they are great at creating alignment between people who have different background. But are not really good for complex use case. Look at excel, nobody is going to say that this is not a killer product but still being not opinionated at all. On the other side Github is a killer product and very opinionated.<p>But anything is possible, look I&#x27;m currently building an alternative to Confluence. You could say that knowledge management is a perfect area for opinionated software, so why is Notion (not opinionated) the killer product in that domain now ?

Maybe Microsoft did the user research and knows that most users want to preserve formatting when they paste in text. You prefer it to match style when pasting, but how do you know most users don&#x27;t prefer it the way it is now?<p>User research, A&#x2F;B testing, etc. is the way to make those decisions. And yes, I do believe in being opinionated when making software - but I didn&#x27;t find your primary example to be compelling evidence of that fact.

All of my favorite products are completely unopinionated. Of course, aligning yourself with a specific audience will move units, but it won&#x27;t make your product any better or worse. The only way you can actually improve your product is by becoming less opinionated and listening to the community who uses your product. Oftentimes their insight will be much more valuable than just &quot;being opinionated&quot;.

This is the actual key to building MVPs. A good MVP provides exactly 1 way to do something impactful for a certain target customer base. If you have alternative paths&#x2F;options&#x2F;configurations, you built too much before testing in the market.

&gt; <i>Conventions create an opinionated product. Opinions create user delight. User delight creates successful businesses.</i><p>The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people, those people may refuse to touch it. Me <i>not</i> included (I have to stress that), my opinions are not set in stone, and I see the reasons why the language designers did it the way they did - in the end, having a standard way of doing things, even if it&#x27;s not everyone&#x27;s favorite way, is better than fragmentation.

In order to have an opinion, you have to have a value judgement. Value judgements take courage. Value judgements require saying this is more important, these types of users will not be included.

I always feel with titles like this I want to respond back with one of the following: 1. Maybe or 2. Until it is too much x aka &quot;opinionated&quot;<p>But, still a good read :)

I want to paste without formatting sometimes though?

I still prefer Ant to Maven because with Ant it does what I tell it to do and nothing more.<p>Maven is too slow and I cannot change it.

No.