rgw@icdattcwsm:~/Blog$ cat 2024-10-09-Utility-First-Design.md

Great products are useful. And all that's useful, are great products. While great products are pretty and elegant, the converse is not always true.

Arguably, product-market-fit, can be simplified to a measure of how useful it is.

Utility-first product design is a cousin of servant-leadership.

Once you identify something useful to the consumer, the next step is to scale, qualitatively and quantitively. 

Utility is NOT indespensibility, for no product is indespensible. And if something is indespensible, it is not a product.

It is in fact, the very destructability of a product, or its utility, can causes it to grow in utility. 

What cannot be destroyed, cannot be iterated upon. We have yet, to replace the current air composition of 70% nitorogen, with a better alternative.

Yet, sustainable utility is a two-way street. You can't build something useful for others, unless it is useful to you to begin with. Where is the skin in the game?

Any product consumned or service rendered, where the builder is not its consumer, will rarely be as useful. This is why nutritionists have greater utility than a surgeon - the services of the latter, are, in most cases a compulsion, with the scope of utility confined to risk mitigation.

Start by making something useful for youself. Then, convince another that this would be useful for them too. Build. And, sell.

More often than not, the failure to sell is wrongly diagnosed as a build issue. Building is building. Selling is selling. Being unable to say NO to tweak the build, is a selling problem, NOT a building problem. 

As Aldous Huxley once, quipped - for in our dreams, we have seen beyond the limits of our philosophy, and in the marketplace, the limits of utility.

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