Scott A. Gatz

Less, Never More: Launching a Product with Critical Features and Nothing More

Yahoos advanced products team is a small team that develops and incubates new product ideas before formally launching them and integrating them with the Yahoo! network. We conceived, built and launched Mixd, a social mobile product experiment, in a 9 month timeframe. We were extremely focused on a specific problem of our target audience and remained true to that problem throughout. We focused ourselves and selected our product features with our target audience in mind. We took every opportunity to spend time with our users and integrated their feedback through the entire design process. Our process was agile and enabled us to move quickly and change course based on the feedback we received. We experienced first hand how a focus on our users and how removing complexity and assumptions in our product allowed people to use our product in unintended ways. Those unanticipated uses can end up being more interesting than your original idea.