Are you letting your OSS get too prescriptive?

In the early days of my career, I was the stereotypical Engineer. I’d get into a project, do the best job I possibly could from a technical perspective, and then get out to move onto the next project.

Looking back, I unfortunately had blinkers on through those years. I’ve been lucky to have retained some great friendships from those days, but I also didn’t put any time into retaining or cultivating the many other fruitful working relationships I had 20 years ago.

Back then, I didn’t realise the value of fostering strong relationships that endure beyond the terms of a given project. I would not have realised then just how profound the following quote was, which I only recently heard – Your network is your net worth.

I realise the power of those words far more today, now that I regularly find myself performing the role of a connector – of people, projects, ideas, technologies and more. This increasingly includes bringing OSS buyers and sellers together. Not just of products, but of companies (in the merger and acquisition sense). 

It was in one of these match-making sessions recently that I found myself completely off the topic of OSS, yet still stumbling upon two concepts of great insight to share with OSS creators.

Of all things, we were talking about Augmented Reality toys. Like I said, not exactly a significant overlap with the world of OSS right? But highly interesting nonetheless.

One of the attendees, a man I was meeting for the first time, had already had some experience in successfully pitching tech ideas to toy companies. His closing suggestions, whilst having absolutely nothing to do with OSS, are unadulterated words of wisdom for us in the OSS industry:

  1. Don’t be prescriptive in the vision. Tell the concept and let others fill in the gaps
  2. Focus on prototyping the experience and not getting caught up in the technology

Let’s look at these in order. 

#1 – Don’t be too prescriptive – By their very nature, most OSS tend to be very prescriptive. They have dozens / hundreds of functionalities baked in. Whether during sales, requirements, design, build, test or training phases, we tend to tell the users in great detail how they should be using the OSS we make. We don’t tend to describe the concept and let the buyers / users fill in the blanks of what they need within their context. Many of the tools we design don’t have the flexibility of screens / workflows / data to cope with their unique situations (and every customer is a unique situation!!). The best OSS tools I’ve used are designed to be adaptable

#2 – Prototype the experience – Before getting too carried away with the technology we’ve built (in a highly prescriptive, baked-in way?), it’s important to prototype the experience. This means first understanding who will use the OSS and what they will do with it. Then experiment with end-to-end workflows, optimising for efficiency and accuracy (again every customer is a unique situation!!) rather than insisting on pre-defined methods.

What do you think? Do these quotes have relevance to you or do I just have a one-tracked mind – trying to bring every concept back to OSS? 🙂

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