Your wife has a dream…

She wants to move to the country, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. After all, your kids need trees to climb, grass to roll around in, and dirt to throw in each other’s eyes.

You study Zillow like a textbook before a final exam. Finally, you find the perfect property: a three bedroom, two bath house on an acre of land. Offer made, offer accepted.

A few months after moving in, you take a new, work-from-home job. There’s just one problem—you don’t have space for an office. Luckily, you do have money in your savings account, and decide to add a room to your house so you can work in peace.

Your kids keep growing. Eventually, they decide they’re too old to share a room. Adding more square footage to the house seems like less work than listening to them fight all the time.

More time passes. Your wife’s elderly mother falls and breaks her hip. “Oh, Mom, just come stay with us,” your wife says. Before you know it, your wife and mother-in-law are calling contractors, asking how much it would cost to add another room to the house. It’s okay, though. Your mother-in-law will use her husband’s life insurance money to pay for the whole thing.

Years later, you look at your house. The layout doesn’t make sense, the siding doesn’t match. What was once a quaint country cottage is now a frankenstein-esque monstrosity.

Worse, your mother-in-law passed and your kids moved out. Now you spend your free time cleaning rooms no one uses and grumbling about the way-too-high energy bill. Worse, even if you convinced your wife to sell the place, you can’t because it looks like it’s from the Upside Down.

Not exactly your dream house.

This sad story is similar to the way most companies build their software products.

Someone has an idea. Usually, someone with a lot of sway within the organization. Probably someone who signs checks. (No, of course I’m not calling out your CEO! How dare you…)

The idea gets made and tacked on to the existing software. The process repeats itself multiple times. After a while, said software is so bogged down by new ideas that it’s almost impossible to work with. Because of this, additional employees are hired to help maintain the product. This puts a strain on company budgets, while alienating customers. Why would they keep paying for a tool that takes too long to barely do what they need it to do? Answer: they won’t.

Remember, you build software to make someone’s life better and provide value to them.

You could add a gaggle of features to your product. But this is rarely the best plan.

Successful software companies learn about their customers’ pain points. Then they build a tool that overcomes these challenges in an efficient way.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at Grammarly, which helps users improve their written communications. Many marketers use the tool to level up their promotional materials.

After a quick look at its website, however, you’ll notice that Grammarly does NOT offer email marketing solutions or customer relationship management tools—even though marketers use these platforms on a regular basis. Grammarly focuses on what it does best.

The same is true for Canva, which can turn almost anyone into a professional designer. Simply choose the kind of project you want to work on—a birthday card, a YouTube video, an infographics that provides valuable insights, etc. Then Canva will help you make it look amazing.

While Canva helps users create eyecatching designs, it does NOT provide in-app distribution. If you want to send your designs to someone, you’ll need to use an actual communication tool.

Where does this leave your company and its bloated software?

This is how your software feels.

Remember that house in the country? The only way to fix it is to knock it down and rebuild. Luckily, this isn’t the case for your software. You have a much more appealing option…

You can strip your software down, removing features your customers don’t care about. You can then reconfigure the whole application to meet said customers’ exact needs. Doing so has a few important benefits:

• Streamlining your software will save your company money. Companies often choose to rebuild their software, rather than streamline it. This is a MUCH more expensive option. How much more expensive? Well, I saved one of my clients an estimated $5M dollars by convincing them to downsize instead of rebuild. Lean software is also easier to maintain. Because of this, you won’t have to add as many developers to your team. So, in a nutshell, streamlining provides upfront and long-tail financial benefits. As such, it’s often the best route to a successful project.
• Streamlining your software will save your company time. What if the company above (you know, the one I helped save $5M) had gone through with their original plan? It would have taken them over three years to completely rebuild their application. Conversely, the streamlining process took a few months. In other words, this company gave itself three extra years to earn revenue and grow its customer base. Imagine what your brand could do with that time.
• Streamlining your software will create team cohesion. Your developers want to build something awesome. They’re tired of working through slop to build new features. They’re sick of reading bad reviews about their app’s clunky interface and slow speed. By streamlining your software, you’ll give your team a new sense of purpose. They’ll know exactly what to work on and how to get the job done. And they’ll actually enjoy the development process again, which will enable peak performance.
• Streamlining your software will serve your customers more effectively. Customers purchase or subscribe to your software to solve a problem. Streamlined software will help them solve said problem more efficiently. This will lead to happier customers, better reviews and more referrals, and ultimately, more money for your organization. Why? Because your product will align with its users’ wants and needs.

This sounds great, Jordan. But how do I actually go about streamlining my software?

I’m glad you asked! Streamlining software effectively comes down to the three Ps: people, process, and product. Let me explain…

Say yes to the three P’s!

• People: Do you have the right amount of people on your team? Sadly, you might have to let a few developers go—or give them new tasks to work on. Remember, you hired these folks to maintain code/features that you no longer need. Streamlined workflows and reduced headcount are in order.
• Process: Is each team member working on the right tasks? Said tasks should serve your end customer and your unique goals as a company. Basically, don’t implement business processes because mega brands like Apple and Netflix do. Implement business processes that fit your specific situation, goals, and customer base.
• Product: Are you building the product your customers actually need? Everything you make should serve the end user. If it doesn’t, remove it from your software. So, forget about the “cool” ideas and focus on custom development tasks that matter.

That the idea of streamlining software is counterintuitive to most tech management teams. You’re trying to keep your job. One of the best ways to do that is to blend in. Rocking the boat is not recommended.

But the alternative is a serious problem. You have to hire more developers to maintain your bloated product. This costs more money and impedes business operations. In most scenarios, streamlining is the better option—hard as it may be.