Business and Beyond: Toyota, Drums, and Customer Experience (a Product Development Lifecycle Whitepaper)
Original post: June 3, 2011 | GoogleScholar | Academia.edu
Simple products break less
Here and there in my career, I have worked with software people. Whenever my modest inputs are required to help software developers build better digital products, I like to say this, among other things: “Let’s make this feature work like a drum!” This expression is not my own – I “inherited” it from a good friend who is a front-end developer, but it represents a principle in product design that I follow (more on that later). And believe it or not, it all started with cars and drums and LSD… as in Lean Software Development. Since we happen to be humans (even the geekiest of us), sometimes it helps to remember why simplicity is the mother of genius – because simple things break less. This notion is at the core of great products and customer experiences.