Many developers will preach a Rework-esque world of product development where you focus on keeping your feature set small and relentlessly curated until you understand perfectly the customers pain.
They might even go to the extreme of saying that if a customer wants something that doesn’t fit your product then they should be encouraged to leave. Many developers subscribe to the notion that if you build the perfect software people will use it, fall in love, and never leave. Their general philosophy is that if you consistently focus on creating value the product will “sell itself”.
One prime example of this mentality is the App stores where developers spend thousands of hours developing apps for free with the hope that you will eventually suck it up and pay 99 cents. But the sad part of the story is that most of us won’t end up buying anything. 98% actually wont buy the app even though they might use it every day!
Because developers are so entrenched in creating value they don’t think about the importance of being able to capture the value. When the app doesn’t start making them money they immediately think that their must be something wrong with their app. But the problem is rarely the app. It is the fact that they have failed to explain and capture the value that they created.
I bet that if you were to ask someone at random the question, “who has made the biggest impact on technology in the last 10 years?”. The name would probably be Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. But I would argue that both of them were actually experts at capturing value than creating it. Jobs knew how to capture 2x the value of a Windows computer. Bill Gates knew how to capture value which he makes very apparent in his letter Open Letter to Hobbyists.
In the technology industry the most prolific names are not Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman. I would argue that Linus and Richard have created more value than most developers can even imagine, but Bill’s and Steve’s bank accounts and media coverage would prove that they knew how to capture it.
So when you sit down to write your next application remember that creating value is one battle which requires great engineering ability, but explaining and capturing the value of technology is equally as important. In the long run the ability for you to capture value will allow you to create more value.
Which have you found more important, creating or capturing value?
Jeff Potter's Blog 