Maru and I are currently in Menorca for a wedding. We’re sharing a four bedroom Airbnb with good friends, and during the course of the weekend we discovered an oddity in the kitchen.
The owners only included 3 normal sized mugs, but had 56 sets of espresso cups and saucers.
56!
To make things weirder, there was no coffee machine in the house to make espresso. So although the set of espresso cups and saucers look striking, they have little to no functional value.
This is an example of little consequence, but it serves as a good metaphor for products and services that are built without thinking about the end user. The feature the team wants to build looks cool—56 sets of espresso cups and saucers cool—but if it doesn’t solve a real problem for real people, the feature has no value. Zero.