90% is good enough

When doing product development (especially as a tech fascinated engineer as I), it's easy to fall into the trap of wanting to build "the perfect solution".

Fully featured.
Perfect UI and UX.
Blazingly fast.
Limitless scalability.

... and I could keep on going. 

I always do my best to achieve all of the above.

But sometimes doing 90% is enough to deliver 100% of the value.

What's really important when designing and building a product or feature is fully understanding the problem you're solving for the customer.

What is the perceived value of the customers? What they're trying to achieve by using the product?

A great example is our recent "FAQs in live chats" update. 

The fully-featured "Rolls Royce" solution would be to build an advanced if-this-then-that multi-scenario flow builder tool that would let our customers design complex user journeys in a neat interface to guide their customers to the right answers in our live chat widget.

But what is it our customers really want?

They want their customers to be able to quickly find the answers to the most frequently asked questions.

So instead of spending months building the fully featured solution that would solve almost all thinkable scenarios, we spent two weeks integrating the FAQs from our help center into our Live Chat.

That lets our customers customers quickly find the answers to the most frequently asked questions.

I'll admit: Building the full solution sounds like a super exciting technical challenge that I'd love to deep dive in.

But by focusing on the outcome, we were able to deliver the full value in two weeks instead of several months.

Sometimes doing 90% (or less) is still enough to deliver 100% of the value that the customers are looking for.