Chapter four
The app acquired a second business.
The work around selling it had its own language and demands. Branding, positioning, search, advertising, email, and measurement all wanted attention. It became possible to spend an entire day around the product without changing anything the customer would use.
Each task could be justified. That was what made the problem difficult. There was no single foolish decision to remove and make everything simple. The weight came from the collection.
There was a temptation to treat being busy as evidence that the business was moving forward. Much of the work could produce something visible: another page, another report, another connection. The harder question was whether that output changed the customer’s experience. I needed to be willing to ask it even when the answer made an impressive amount of activity look less useful.
I needed to step back far enough to see the whole cost. What was this growing business actually doing to bring someone closer to the app?
The modern stack
The useful idea was becoming hard to see.
Around a finished product, many other businesses can find work. That does not make the work dishonest. But it can move the maker’s attention toward serving the surrounding businesses instead of the intended customer.
I had to notice that change before I could do anything about it. Circle’s original purpose was easy to explain. The growing collection around selling it was much harder to describe in the same plain terms.
A customer does not usually arrive wondering whether a maker has the latest collection of business tools. They arrive because something in their own life needs attention. I wanted our work to begin there again. That meant describing the situation plainly enough that the right person could recognize it, and leaving enough room for them to decide whether the app fit.
I wanted the product to become visible again. That meant choosing a way of working in which someone reaching the app was the point of the effort, not a distant outcome I kept hoping would follow.
The modern stack
The numbers could keep me busy forever.
Reports can answer useful questions. They can also create a steady supply of new ones. A chart changes, and somebody has to decide what it means. A number improves, and it is tempting to assume the customer’s experience improved with it.
I wanted to know which measurements were connected to the work that mattered. Did people understand the offer? Could they install? Did the product do what they expected? A larger number somewhere else could not answer those questions for me.
A useful measurement should make a decision easier. If it cannot tell us what to improve or whether something worked, it can become another demand on attention. I wanted to keep the questions understandable enough that a result would mean something. A person reaching the right installation page is a clearer event than a general feeling that the numbers ought to look better.
The danger was spending more effort explaining the reports than understanding the person. A product can become easy to measure and difficult to see clearly at the same time.
The modern orbit
Another tool for the tools I already had.
The growing collection promised to make the work easier. Keeping that collection useful became work of its own.
The question was no longer simply what another service could do. It was how much of my attention the whole arrangement would leave for Circle.