Working at Watu I came up with the categorization of products by width. There are products that are wide and products that are narrow. They have different traits and understanding those traits is important. Watu is a wide product. Twitter is a narrow product while Facebook is wider. This is not a matter of complexity or size but a matter of how many modules or independent parts a product has. An example of a narrow but complex product is Apple’s Siri.
GitHub used to be a narrow product: git repositories. Now it is a wider product: git repositories plus issue tracker, plus wiki for documentation, plus public pages. You can think of more features that GitHub could add to make it a wider product: product management, customer management, etc. Adding those features make GitHub a wider product, while adding pull requests handling doesn’t.
The advantage of wider products is that they are the all in one solution for more people than narrow products. That’s because people tend to have a wide variety of needs. If your social needs is just sending short messages, Twitter is the all-in-one, but if you also share pics, organize events, form groups, etc., then Twitter is no longer the all-in-one product and you need a wider solution, like Facebook.
The advantage of being the all-in-one product is that if your users are not looking outside your product they are less likely to jump to the competition. They are also more likely to put up with an inferior solution in one or several aspects because the other aspects make up for it and the seamless interconnection of the different parts of the product is in itself a big plus.
For example, if Facebook implements a Doodle-like module, it doesn’t have to be as good as Doodle to make me switch to it, because I’m already inside Facebook for socializing and event handling, so also using it for deciding when an event happens is very convenient (Facebook, please, don’t kill Doodle… just buy them if you have to).
But, there are some dangers to building wide products. Once is that it’s harder to keep focus because you need to constantly jump between modules. If I was to develop Twitter by myself I would be much more effective than if I was to develop Facebook, because I would have less context switching. I believe this point is not true when you have more people than modules so each person or team can keep focus. But when you are a small three-person startup, this is something worth considering.
Another danger of having a wide product is that, even as a developer, it’s scary to jump outside. At Watu we saw several opportunities to build different products where a customer came with a need that didn’t match Watu perfectly. Every time we discarded it because building a new product and making it as wide as Watu was too much work and modifying Watu was undesirable. The truth is that maybe those products didn’t need to be as wide, they didn’t need all these modules and features, but that fact was very hard to see when we were living and breathing Watu every day.
