There are products that need to be delivered finalized. Such as the iPhone. No chances for iterations.
The customer expects a final product, ready to go and polished.
Other products will become the best through evolution, iteration and time in use. They, by definition will ship in the worst state that they’ll ever be.
They will sometimes ship as a different product than what they will end up being.
These are evolutionary products.
It is critical to understand what type of product you have. That will (or should) shape your entire approach to how you deliver the product.
Each of these types of product are built on different assumptions.
For final products it is assumed that we know what the goal is and what the outcome should look like. That gives a guidepost to aim for and how to measure success and progress.
Evolutionary products don’t have any of that.
Evolutionary products require that people use it.
And by using that people feed back into the product with their own experiences.
And by listening closely to these experiences and acting on it, the product evolves and gets shaped into what it is supposed to be.
However it is hard to really listen.
Evolutionary products start with a strong assumption: they are never done.
There’s always an improvement, sometimes a regression, and most of the time iteration and small steps that makes the product better and better.
The key point of evolutionary products is that one cannot know the final state because there is no final state.
In other words, you start with the problem you want to solve, then iterate your way towards it while accepting that you don’t know the final answer. There is no final answer. There is no final state.
I will say it once more:
There is no final state.
That is both the bless and the tragedy of evolutionary products. They continue to adapt, evolve and sometimes devolve as time goes on.
This is the main feature.
The other feature is the following:
What you can think about today is not the end state. It is only your next step.
This means that you should not even try to predict the future about what this product will turn out to be. You can’t.
The focus is always on:
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In short, evolutionary products have two features that dictates how they should be thought about and handled: