Howdy, picnickers!

Today we’re going to start with a Christopher Alexander quote, which is extremely cliche for a UX designer accused of thought leadership, but nevertheless extremely relevant to our topic today.

Reading Material

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. 

In 1999, Elon Musk was trying to create an “everything app” called X.com. In the high-octane late 90s tech scene, this was hardly an outlier – we can look to AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and similar “portal” companies that tried to grab share from every market they could by offering a digital access point to every service they could think of from the comfort of your very own boxy beige PC. 

Many of those portals still exist as pale shadows of their former market dominance, but X.com was not so lucky. Shortly after its merger with PayPal, Musk would be fired by the company’s board, and the X name would lie dormant until being pressed upon Twitter in 2023. Together with reviving the name, Musk claimed that he would also revive X’s mission to become the everything app – though since he had just fired 2/3rds of his company, it would take two more years for the first step of that vision to come to fruition through a financial services partnership with Visa. 

But – just like in 1999 – many other companies are aiming for the “everything app” crown. Sam Altman is gunning for a combination social media and blockchain app. Brian Chesky is not far behind with the introduction of gig services to AirBnB, and his own everything app in the works. Even Ryan Breslow, the beleaguered CEO of Bolt, plans a “super app.” 

Sprawling your offering to remain competitive is nothing new. Our beloved Figma is making similar missteps in its own market. And then, of course, there was the Metaverse – going from $13 trillion-dollar opportunity to punchline in three years. 

The drive to become the provider of Everything is understandable. It's the same reason Walmart is excited about AI agents – if you can wedge a service in between people and what they want, you can reap massive rents, even if people can already do that thing (in this case – recurring reorders) without you just fine today. The Everything App can’t help but step on toes; when you do everything, you compete with everyone. 

The Timeline

Unfortunately, “build me everything” is not a product strategy. We see it play out with dashboards all the time – no research or direction, constant pivots, and unclear value in a quest to deliver everything for everyone. 

And yet execs will continue to ask for “build me everything” and middle managers will keep trying to make “everything” happen, because getting stakeholders and investors excited about an Everything App is the easiest job in the world. 

The hard work and uncertainty of selling it (which Rob Snyder outlines in great detail here, and which every UXer should read) disappears when these teams fool themselves into thinking that of course there is a market for Everything, and of course it is infinite in size. Teams can generate infinite confirmatory evidence for “people want everything” if they never deliberately try to disconfirm their beliefs. 

It’s easy to get the team excited about building Everything, too. Devs will never sit idle and PMs can cut ticket after ticket without thinking too hard. Building an Everything App is smooth sailing – up until the point that you launch it. And then it fails. 

The portals all failed. The Everything Dashboards all fail. And the Everything Apps will fail. 

There are two reasons for this. 

The first reason is that the quest to build a complex system from scratch is doomed from the start, because the complexity of the system needs to account for the complexity of the world that it engages with, and getting everything right in one shot is a Herculean task. But the first reason is, by far, the lesser of the two. 

The second reason is that the Everything App is not the goal of the companies announcing it. It is a symptom. And the disease that creates the Everything App is Nothing Management. Managers who have outsourced their decision-making to meaningless and wasteful surveys. Managers who are “data-driven” solely because they have no strategy and need the data to tell them what they should do. 

As a result, when product teams look to management to tell them what the strategy is, they get back platitudes based on the latest keyword. Oh, personalization, have we tried that yet? What about making our toilet more smart, interactive, and engaging – surely someone out there wants that? 

This is something Agile is not set up to handle well. 

The rise of Nothing Management has only become accelerated by AI tools that isolate everyone, from executives at the highest level on down, from their reports and customers. This is a topic that deserves its own issue (stay tuned for that next week). 

In the meantime, how do you avoid being a Nothing Manager (or, if you are unlucky enough to work with one, push back)? In addition to Snyder’s deck linked above, there are two pieces I came across this week that outline solutions. 

Tom Kerwin (a good friend of the Picnic) writes about “bending the curve of luck” when it comes to good product decisions that always seem to fail. Note the key to this method: disconfirming your assumptions, avoiding waste when it would have been easy to let the devs go build something without checking to see whether it was useful. 

For a longer read, Brad Delong writes about management cybernetics. This has nothing to do with Robocop unfortunately (I'd love to see that product delivery methodology) but rather with the systems that govern how decisions are made, and who is accountable for them. UXers and PMs who find themselves regularly pressured into distasteful trade-offs would do well to read this essay, and thereby understand why that is happening. 

Diagram of the Week

It’s about time that the Picnic featured its first-ever food item. In this case, a Story Sandwich – a metaphor I use to help stakeholders understand that the technological intervention (the topping) is not edible unless it is nested between a pain point and a success story (the bread). 

In my career I’ve seen some truly terrible story sandwiches from every field. For example, Product: 

• Customers needed to manage their configs. 

• We released the config manager. 

• Now they can manage their configs. 

From design: 

• Customers needed the website to be easier to use.

• We redesigned it. 

• Now it is easier to use. 

Or a similar story from engineers about technical problems: 

• Customers were on foobar1, which is not the latest version. 

• We migrated to foobar2. 

• Now customers are on the latest version. 

There will be an infinite number of stories like these on any product, but especially on a product scoped to be an Everything App. You will feel like you are making progress as you scope, design, code, and deliver these stories. But they provide no user value. There’s no bread to hold on to. 

— Pavel at the Product Picnic