This article was born out of the madness that modern life has become, especially at this time of year, with runaway consumerism fully embedded in our daily lives. We lose our sense of the “real value” of things.
I’m not only referring to economic consumerism, but also to the consumption of information, to the extreme that we relate to one another through memes, and to transmedia hyperconnection, where we avoid calling a friend so as not to bother them.
A common example we often encounter when working with large multinational companies is online meetings with more than six attendees, where usually only one person speaks and the rest simply nod or add minor “clarifications.” Does anyone ever calculate the hourly cost per employee of those meetings?
Perhaps a well-prepared document shared with the entire team, followed by a final meeting with the responsible stakeholders to validate the team’s feedback, would be more than enough.
Last year, during the Product Management and Culture course at the Tramontana Institute, we talked extensively about the importance of “constraints” when creating a digital product. The limit is our imagination, and we work on applications where the workspace is infinite, as if it was a blank canvas. In this context, the so-called “big ideas” such as a redesign, an app, or a SaaS product often have no budget that can sustain them unless they are properly defined and constrained.
How to encourage austerity?
- Think small in order to achieve big results.
- Eliminate the superficial.
- Prioritize features and development efforts.
- Encourage teams to work in self-contained, autonomous deliveries.
- Work with sprints constrained by time and budget.
- Test quickly from the start and iterate as many times as necessary.
How to know what is essential and what is not in your project
- Features: determine what is core and what is peripheral.
- Simplicity: start simple and add complexity only when necessary.
- Pace: time costs money.
- Limit: evaluate the opportunity cost of each feature and consider what happens if you don’t implement it.
- Modular: think of features as “plugins” that can be connected, disconnected, and evolved in parallel.
- Be agile: don’t look for a solution to everything; small solutions that interact with each other are better.
Limitations Begin with the Brief
In interwar Germany, at a time when the country needed to motorize quickly and economically, the government issued a very demanding brief. They wanted a car capable of carrying two adults and three children at a maximum speed of 100 km/h, with a beautiful and aerodynamic design. Additionally, it had to withstand the harshest conditions, require low maintenance, and have a selling price not exceeding 990 Reichsmarks of the time*.
A few years after the brief, in 1949, and under the guidance of engineer Ferdinand Porsche, the “Type 1” model of Volkswagen (the “people’s car”) was born, popularly known as “The Beetle.”
* Considering that the average monthly salary at the time was between 160 and 190 Reichsmarks, if we project that to the present day based on the current average Spanish salary of 1.670€, we would be talking about approximately 8.851€ today.
