Szymon Kaliski

Improvements vs Breakthroughs

The title is most probably wrong!

• thinking about the tension between approaching things in "improvement" fashion - asking how the users use the product, and figuring out small iterative improvements, vs following "intuition"(?) and working towards(?) breakthroughs

  • is this related to discussion around method? - I know very little about scientific method, so this is just an uninformed intuition

    Of course, standard methods can be incredibly helpful. But they're subordinate to really, truly wanting to get to the bottom of things, so much so you're willing to throw out your pet beliefs & the beliefs of your tribe

    — Michael Nielsen - https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1316779400906469377 ↗

• there's an important tension here, as in how much of the product is shaped by what users currently know, vs how long do we follow the intuition without a "market fit" hoping that the intuition is correct?

• it's hard to ask people for feedback when trying to introduce something new in a sense, especially if it requires learning and has some barrier of entry

  • but most important technologies have high barriers of entry - written/spoken language, mathematics, etc. all require conscious effort to master, but the "payout" is huge - maybe there's some relation between how high the entry barrier can be vs how big the "payout" is?

• references:

  • Incremental and Radical Innovation ↗ - Don Norman, Roberto Verganti

Backlinks

1. 2021-06-29Tensions¹