Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Rob McWhirter

This summer I’ve been growing tomatoes. Big juicy ones they are — to my surprise it’s gone quite well.

To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was doing; the garden was more of a football pitch than an eden growing up, so this was my first foray into actually growing something useful.

Luckily I found an excellent guide in on my parent’s bookcase. His name is Percy.

A man who really knew his onions

According to Percy, if you want to grow good sized tommies, you need to regularly remove new stalks and stick with the strongest:

“Regularly pinching out of tomato side shoots will concentrate the plant’s energy into producing fruit”, says Mr Thrower. That way, all the plants energy goes into that stem and the fruits get big, juicy and tasty.

Those little side shots are called suckers — they suck the energy out of where you want it. If you don’t cut them off you’ll end up with lots of stems and leaves, but very little in the way of fruit. And if you have your heart set on making a tasty tomato soup come September, fruit is what you need.

So, although it felt wrong, I started cutting off those sucker shoots. Instead of getting super excited about how big and bushy my tomato plants were getting I was trimming them back to the bones.

The plants looked pretty pathetic at first: thin, boney, weedy things; but in the longterm, they grew big and tall and produced sumptuous fruits. But once I had the fruit in my hand I didn’t care about how big the plant was. A big bushy tomato plant might look like a success, but it’s the tomatoes that count.

All projects have suckers

Once I started carrying out this process with my tomatoes, I started using this approach in other ‘projects’ in my life.

Taking learning Spanish as an example: instead of learning obscure animals, fruits and countries like I would at school, I focused on only the most common verbs and nouns. I don’t need to know the Spanish word for peacock when asking for directions to the bar, so why bother learning it? I decided to focus on the fundamentals and the rest would come later.

Focusing my energy on one core shoot like this, without any other distractions, was liberating. I suddenly had so much more time to master the words that mattered. I saw the fruits of my labours a whole lot quicker and soon knew enough to get by on my holiday to Barcelona.

It’s “Pavo real”, in case you were wondering. That literally translates to “Royal turkey”. Excellent.

I applied this approach to work too, carrying out a similar process with Twine, our SaaS intranet product.

Enter the product

To be honest Twine was a pretty bloated product in late 2016.

It contained an expenses module, a file management system, instant chat, forums, workgroups, a form builder, news, a knowledge base, a calendar tool, a time off tool and a bunch of other stuff loosely tied to the workplace.

Everything you could ever need to get work done, right?

But sales weren’t reflecting that. In fact, to our horror, prospective customers were only interested in 3 or 4 of the same apps. They had specialist ones to deal with the rest: Google Drive for file management, Slack for messaging, Expensify for expenses tracking.

We were descending into becoming the Mama’s Kitchen of enterprise software: doing a lot of things, but doing them all quite badly.

You don’t want a pizza from a kebab shop. Trust me.

So, instead, we accepted that we can’t solve everyone’s problems. Not everyone can be your customer, and that’s okay, but we’re going to serve the ones that are really damn well.

Kill your darlings

So, we started cutting off those stems that we sucking our energy. Just like I did in my garden, we started pinching off those shoots of the product that were not essential. This was a difficult process, but it meant we could focus on parts of the product that our customers found most valuable.

This isn’t an easy thing to do. You have to approach this rationally and get your head around the sunk cost fallacy.

We pinched off our expenses app. Expensify do it better.

We snipped away our File manager. Google Drive do it better.

We phased out or Forums feature. Our own Groups feature does it better.

Immediately we found we spent less time spent fixing bugs, producing marketing material and answering support requests about these features that weren’t actually adding much value.

That meant we could concentrate all of our energy on enhancing those features that were truly useful and making them better than anyone else can. Anything else, we’ll just integrate with.

Grow and trim, grow and trim

For about a year now, we’ve been growing the product but trimming it back at the same time. It’s a counterintuitive process, but it’s left us with a healthy, focused product that is thriving.

To find out what our core stem was, we answered this simple question: what are our customers finding most valuable? We’d just do that even better.

In our case it’s a kick-ass knowledge base, awesome workgroups and a rich people directory. We want to make a focused product that addresses these features better than anything else out there.

Keep growing, but keep on trimming. Your customers will thank you for it.

A note posted through my door after leaving some toms outside

How to grow juicy tomatoes and a great product was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to grow juicy tomatoes and a great product

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