Zvi Band Relationships are our most important asset.

What I’ve Learned about Opinionated Software

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Any piece of software represents the opinions of the organization that produced it. As I look back on the journey I’ve had in engineering, product, and leadership, I’ve come to accept that many products – my own portfolio included – would benefit from being more opinionated.

Inherently some opinions are always present – the mere act of prioritization is tied to some theory around what is important to have. Technical or legal limitations pose additional constraints, which can be tied to opinions. We limited the user to send 300 emails a day on our platform in large part because anything beyond that risks flagging your Gmail account. That constraint, while true, also formed our perspective when talking to users – it’s not just that you can’t message 300 people a day, but you shouldn’t – for your sake and theirs – in the pursuit of building an authentic relationship. The same with SMS – we never built a workaround using Twilio for programmatic texting, as your sphere of influence receiving a message from a different phone number seemed like a terribly inauthentic experience.

Especially in SaaS, we talk a lot about building platforms – an agnostic chassis of data stores, APIs, and presentation layers that can be configured in any way possible. We had “buckets” – you can have as many buckets as you want, put as many people into buckets, set whatever rules you want on those buckets. If you wanted 500 groups of 500 people with a reminder to stay in touch with them every give days, 🤘🏼!

There’s an opportunity to go even further in developing opinionated software. Instead of indifferent platforms and leaving it to product marketing smooshing (yes, I used that word) the screen with layer upon layer of in-app pop-ups, videos, and KB articles, what if the software presented a clear guided path. How would the user benefit from seeing the one next best action we want them to take, instead of presenting 100 different buttons and links on a screen – necessitating them reading a book to figure out which one to click at that moment?

This represents my own journey to date, and where I go from here. As I think about building products in the future, there will be a continual need to create a canvas upon which people create their art. The 80% of users often, just want to be told what to do – so be the expert, and don’t leave it to the user to figure out.

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By Zvi
Zvi Band Relationships are our most important asset.

Zvi Band

Founder of Contactually.
I'm also passionate about growing the DC startup community, and I've founded Proudly Made in DC and the DC Tech Meetup.

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