Adding Value the Easy Way
Any creation, be it a piece of art, physical object, or software, can be separated into what I’ll call a “core competency” and “extras”. The core competency is essentially the reason that people want that creation. The extras are things that can make it much better, but aren’t actually going to draw anyone in by themselves. Here are some examples:
Microsoft Word’s core competency is writing text documents. The extras are features like macros, clip art, and embedded video.
Frozen’s core competency is telling an emotional story about growing up and understanding oneself. The extras are all the fancy animation effects and catchy songs.
The core competency of a chair is being a comfortable platform to sit on. Extras are things like attractive designs, paint color, sturdy construction, or being foldable.
You might quibble with some of the details here, but the exact distinction is not very important. The reason for introducing this concept isn’t to specifically analyze any one thing, but to suggest two principles that you can use to improve the quality of your creations.
Core Competencies Should Be Great
Facebook (now Meta) is known for having as part of its philosophy the phrase “done is better than perfect”. Although I’m not sure how much that is still true today, it has certainly attracted its fair share of criticism over the years. I think the disconnect reflects a difference in understanding as to what this philosophy should apply to.
For the core competency of a product, perfection, although obviously unattainable, is a reasonable goal. We should strive to make the core competency as good as we can make it. That’s the reason that people are interested in our product in the first place, so improving its quality is going to improve your chances of success. Thus if we apply the “done is better than perfect” principle improperly to the core competency of something, it can seem uncaring and inappropriate. Sometimes this can cause issues when the core competency changes over time. While initially privacy wasn’t seen as very important on the web, it has now become considered a critical part of any online service. Any company that didn’t realize that soon enough (like arguably Facebook) suffered negative customer feedback as a result of the disconnect.
Imperfect Extras Add a Lot of Value
Conversely, extras don’t have to be perfect. Because they aren’t the core purpose, they are merely adding extras on top. So for extras done is better than perfect. The corollary of this is that even imperfect extras add a lot of value. No one wants to eat just icing without the cake, but a cake with any icing, even sloppily arranged, is far better than one without any.
This also means that you can sometimes extract a lot of value by adding extras, even if you don’t have expertise in that field. It can be easy to overestimate how hard it is to do something in comparison to professionals. And of course it is hard to achieve professional-level results in most fields. But if you’re dealing with the extras, having as high quality can be less important. Often a small amount of effort yields an outsized result vis-à-vis doing nothing. Sure, it would be ideal to get professional help with everything, but that’s not always possible or cost-effective.
Here are some examples of when it doesn’t take a professional to achieve significant improvement:
A project I worked on used hand-tuned heuristics to rank some results shown to users. We knew that this would work better using an ML model, but no one working on it at the time had ML expertise. While we waited to hire someone with expertise we could have done nothing and left it as is. Instead, we implemented a simple logistic regression model, and after just a few days of work had improved our primary metric by +10%.
In a 2016 talk given by YouTube creator Captain Disillusion, he describes how he was able to come up with some music he uses in his videos despite having no professional music experience. This involved playing around with different sounds and combining them until the result was satisfying. At the time he likely didn’t have the budget to hire a professional musician, but rather than not having music he was able to have something that made his productions feel a lot more polished.
An acquaintance of mine was working on a prototype web app. He didn’t have the money to hire a proper designer, but rather than just make something ugly and unusable, he spent some time reading up on basic UI design principles. This allowed him to make something at least reasonably appealing
In an extreme version of this, programmer Eric Barone created the popular game Stardew Valley by doing all the music and art himself. This is a bit more work than I would generally suggest, but if you have the time and inclination then go for it.
Summary
Identify the parts of your creation that are core competencies. These may vary over time as the nature of your users (or the world) changes.
Focus on doing a great job of addressing those core competencies, hiring the best talent you can afford if you don’t have the skills yourself.
For everything else, it’s less important to be perfect. Often you can get 80% as good results with a fraction of the time and skill.
Don’t be afraid to learn new things and use them to improve your product. Working on extras is a good way to get experience without risking its fundamental success.