The Constraint Advantage: Using Limits to Build Great Products
In 2015, I started my Product Management journey in the Alexa org to help build the first $50 Echo Dot. We had a simple set of objectives. Build a $50 product that had all the features of its $179 sibling (the OG Amazon Echo) and ship it in time for the 2016 holidays. Two simple and well understood constraints that would then help us drive every single decision on the product, leading up to its launch and ultimately its huge success. Without these two constraints, we would have failed.
Building compelling new products takes innovation, an obsession to deliver customer value and a little bit of luck. It also requires a few crisply articulated and well understood constraints to help teams anchor themselves. History is littered with examples of great innovation, a healthy obsession with customer value, lots of luck and yet few really successful products. The constraints make the difference.
In startups and small companies, most of the focus and energy goes into "the one product”, the success of which largely determines the future of the company. This forces real constraints on product development that includes some combination of cost, resources and schedule. There is limited runway to ship, learn, and iterate to achieve product market fit. The constraints thus are inherent to the size and resources of the company building the product.
In larger companies, establishing constraints can be challenging. This is in part because a first generation product is not expected to drive substantial revenue and profits if any. Because there are other parts of the business paying the bills, the team building the first generation product is less burdened with constraints so it can "innovate freely". Resources are often plenty, more than the project actually needs. And schedule is less rigid given that the product is not expected to make or break the fortunes of the company. Taken together, there is lesser urgency, larger budgets, and more resources. You would think this would result in unbounded innovation. Rather, it often results in long gestating projects, constant resets, significant scope creep, large employee churn and large cost overruns. This is not to suggest all new product development in large organizations is late, over budget and messy. The example with Echo Dot at Amazon and the following example of the Quest 2 at Meta illustrate how it can be done right.
In 2019, a few months before we shipped Quest 1, we started working on Quest 2. We established some key product tenets - it would ship in time for holiday 2020 with significant launch volume, it would have a certain set of product improvements compared to the first Quest and that it would ship for $299. In the 18 months that followed, we encountered a ton of challenges around scaling our production, solving specific technical issues and well, COVID. There was also some scope creep, and cost challenges especially around shipments due to the pandemic. But the team was able to deliver because we had communicated our constraints early and everyone working on the program had internalized them. We operated as one team to deliver a compelling product to our customers.
Constraints help build a sense of discipline and singular focus in the team. It helps establish expectations with leadership. Ultimately it sets up the team, the organization and the product on the best course for success.
P.S. If this topic interests you, I recommend my companion piece on Product Tenets.