Overengineering, as its name suggests, is adding features that are not needful for the customers. It even negates the core and basics functionality of the product and leaves it as a useless thing. The downside of this approach (overengineering) is that they don’t add value and make things worse for the customer, and sometimes customers refuse to use your product next time, which can harm your brand and business.
Here in this blog, we have briefly discussed everything you need to know about overengineering your product that can kill its value. So let’s get into it:
What exactly is over-engineering?
Over-engineering is when you spend excessive time and money on a project, resource, or service. Over-engineering is harmful because it’s an investment with no return. It costs more than it should and takes longer to produce when you over-engineer something, putting a company out of budget. Typically over-engineered projects aim to please everyone instead of a particular niche market, simply because it doesn’t need to be built so complexly to suit that niche market.
Overengineering consequences
When building a technology-based business, it’s important to create simple and easy products. If you overcomplicate things, customers will either be overwhelmed by new technology or give up altogether when they realize it is difficult to use your service or software.
Overengineered products also take longer to build and longer for customers to master. In short, taking an overly complex approach is not worth it. Aim for simplicity in everything you do, and don’t add complexity that doesn’t benefit your users or your business model.
A common issue with overengineering is that it doesn’t consider user behavior. Businesses spend so much time building new features and products they often forget what they are truly solving for. The next step is communication — engineering is useless if it isn’t communicated to users or colleagues on what problem it solves and how it should be used.
It also needs to be flexible; you must always leave room for improvement and change. As mentioned before, solutions need to be simple enough that people will use them consistently. Features like a group chat in Facebook messenger show us simplicity’s importance when designing digital tools.
How to prevent over-engineering?
Startups often encounter challenges in engineering their products, especially during their initial development. They tend to over engineer their solution because they don’t know what challenges may arise in production, causing companies to invest more time and money. Overengineering is something that is of no use and on the same point of time waste your resources, time and efforts.
A company should strive to create something that meets its target needs without overcomplicating it.
But how do you prevent over-engineering? Here are some tips
- The best way to avoid overengineering is by having an outside perspective on your product. It can be done by bringing in an outsider for feedback.
- Ask for help from someone who has not been involved with building your project; they will be able to give honest feedback about whether any additional features need to be added to your design before finalizing it.
- You also need someone who knows enough about coding so they can communicate clearly with programmers and developers when developing new features for your product.
- Also, make sure you think through every possible situation of how users might use a feature before adding it to your design.
- There’s nothing worse than creating an unusable feature because no one thought of using it differently!
- Furthermore, primarily targeting those with experience, hire senior engineers who have previously worked for other companies.
Mental models to prevent overengineering
YAGNI
The so-called problem of overengineering is so rampant in the industry that it has an official term – YAGNI, meaning You Aren’t Going to Need It.
The You Aren’t Gonna Need It method (or YAGNI) will try to stop you from adding anything to solve the problem in front of you because, in all likelihood, you won’t need it.
KISS
Keep it simple, stupid (KISS) has been referenced as the philosophy of design and life, signifying that simplistic design is easier to fix, adjust, and keep running smoothly.
Overengineering examples
Examples of overengineering from well-known companies include Apple’s Aperture, Adobe’s Lightroom, and Microsoft’s Zune. Each company created an application with a far higher functionality than users needed in all three cases. The result was products that offered much more than customers could ever use in their day-to-day lives.
Each product struggled to find its place in the market and ultimately failed to attract many users. Overengineering is a common problem for tech startups because young companies want to make sure they have something that appeals to everyone — so they build a tool or website with every feature imaginable, essentially overbuilding it.
For example, if a startup makes an eCommerce website, it might include tools that allow users to create their merchandise and integrate with other third-party tools. That sounds nice in theory, but it also means that adding one new feature might require you to add ten others to ensure compatibility and keep things working smoothly. The result is a bloated application that’s not as user-friendly as it should be and lacks important features because all of them were nice to have instead of needing to have.
How to Overcome Overengineering?
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a development model or strategy for testing your product ideas that includes putting out a prototype and gathering data before you put too much money into something. One reason to use MVP development services is to test market demand for your idea before sinking all your resources into it.
Another great thing about MVP development services is that they help prevent overengineering by focusing on a small core feature set rather than trying to create an elaborate final product from day one. If features in your initial release don’t perform well with users, you can easily roll them back while keeping other features intact.
How to choose the right MVP approach?
Making an MVP for your app or software product, especially before you develop a full-scale application, is a great way to eliminate as many risk factors as possible from your business model. MVP development services can help you make smart decisions about what features should be included in your MVP and how much time you need to develop it.
MVP development companies use their years of experience in MVP development to guide you through all stages of MVP creation. The experts will assist you with choosing the right platform, creating a prototype that works flawlessly and within budget constraints, testing different marketing strategies, and launching your MVP at just the right time.
Conclusion
When you find yourself overengineering a task, stop and ask yourself if it’s really necessary. When you have too many managers or even just one with multiple areas of responsibility, look for ways to separate responsibilities and reassign them to other workers. And finally, when adding features to a software product that already has broad market appeal—or even adding new features period—keep in mind that you’ll need to maintain those features indefinitely.
If they add needless complexity or don’t align with existing workflow, they could harm the adoption of your software instead of helping it. Be careful not to overengineer new features to solve an actual problem: you run the risk of simply creating more problems!
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