The Discipline Of The Sandbox
Jim Nielsen on saying no in an age of abundance:
Maybe we need to reframe the concept of scarcity from us, the makers of software, to them, the users of software.Their resources are what matter most:
Attention (too many features and they can't all be used, or even tried)
Stability (too much frequent change is an impediment to learning a product)
Clarity (too many options creates confusion and paralysis)
Coherence (too many plots and subplots cannot tell a unified story)
So maybe the way you argue for saying "no" isn't because it helps you as a business, but because it helps your customers. It helps them make sense of what you've made.
Constraints do not vanish when production gets cheap. They move to the user's side of the screen.
But maybe scarcity still works for us too? Not as a tax on what we get to make. More like a sandbox we get to play in.
Matt Abrahams in Think Faster, Talk Smarter:
Structure doesn't impede spontaneous communication - it enables it. When the best jazz musicians improvise, they're not just playing whatever random notes pop into their minds. They're improvising within the bounds of informal, preset musical structures. Jazz musicians typically learn a canon of standard songs, the melody and chord progressions of which serve as structures for improvisation.Knowing a given song structure in advance, musicians can improvise in ways that will sound good over a song's basic chords and possibly reference the melody. The existence of a preordained structure makes it much easier for jazz musicians to compose spontaneously - they have some basic parameters or rules within which to work, and they can use these as a jumping-off point to create something original and of the moment. Song structure also helps orient listeners, giving them a logic that they can follow and preventing jazz from sounding like a muddled mess.
Attention, stability, clarity and coherence are not just what you give them.
They are how you get there.