I know I have heard this line a few times of the course of the last couple of weeks in a song that I cannot name to save my life, so if you know the song, please do tell. This line in the song is so appropriate for so many things in life, but the one thing it made me think of specifically is building a product.

Sometimes when we start out developing a new product, we have it in our mind what the product will look like, how it will work and how the users will use it. As it gets closer to crunch time, some of us feel the pressure to get the product out, and are willing to table some of the features for a future release. Others are more head strong and feel that the product cannot be launched without all of the features. In my style of product management and development, you have a core set of features that you want the product to possess before you are ready to show it off to the world, then you quickly follow that up with multiple releases to bring the rest of the features to life. Others feel that they cannot do that, that everything that they envisioned the product to be needs to be there before it is released.

Either way, both approaches work, it is just a matter of style. I personally am a fan of the former, but have been known to do the latter on occasion (rare indeed, but it has happened a time or two). Whatever your approach is, if what you are building is not what your end user needs, the end result will be the same. Everything you built is nothing in the eyes of the users. It happens all the time, you come up with a great idea, you know there is a market need, you do your research and you are on your way to building the next best thing since sliced bread. The blinders go on, you can no longer see the forest for the trees and before you know it, you have built everything, including the kitchen sink and in it turns out to be nothing. This is a bad thing my friend, and it has happened to us all.

In order to make sure that Everything is Everything, iterate on your idea, do focus group studies where you can (once you are in development and before you release the hounds), share your idea with as many colleagues, friends, heck anyone that will listen. Instead of saying what would you want X to do, approach it like here is what I am building, it is going to do X, Y and Z. Would you use it to do those tasks? If not, what would you use to do X, Y and Z. This kind of feedback can go a long way in ensuring that Everything turns out to be Everything to your users.