Customizing the Core
When you have a product and hopefully selling it to customers, it’s really tempting to start making sales contigous on customizing that product suit specific customer enhancement requests.
This is dangerous.
While going down this path may seem harmless at first, it can have some pretty bad end results. The primary one being jagged-ness. There will be all of these pieces sticking out all over the place that would have been built to statisfy one deal or another, but at the end of the day, the business has really only gained short-term cash flow and has not contributed to the strategic product development / vision, which is what’s key.
It’s important for the sales boundaries to be set up front, and it helps if these come top-down. If not selling outside of the core is baked in the culture of the organization, it makes it easier and more natural.
Of course, if there is a customizable piece that is part of the core, by all means, that should be sold (e.g., a web application where the look and feel can be pulled and stretched for the client) and developed as necessary. And if a client has a good enhancement request that can be abstracted up to meet the needs of other clients, then that’s a good thing too.
I’m sure there are plenty of good tactics out there being practiced to prevent this from becoming a pain point in an organization…
July 9th, 2006 at 11:30 am
How true it is. When I was working at as a strategy consultant, I moderated visioning sessions at a middle-tier ERP developer. Their professional services organization had developed over 400 modifications customized for their clients, many of which had ended up being incorporated into the internal implementation of their ERP solution. When it came to deciding which ones to incorporate into the next release of the ERP product, we needed to conduct cross-departmental JAD sessions to prioritize the feature set to develop a manageable product roadmap. We developed a plethora of models to help in the prioritization and visioning. I can look back on it with teary-eyed fondness but “stress” was the word of the day back then. Unfortunately, using the “K.I.S.S.” approach to product management simply isn’t an option.