For twenty years, the hard part of a software business was deciding what to leave out.
Every customer does things a little differently. Product managers found the shape they had in common, gave it a name and a screen, and sold it to all of them. A hundred fields became twelve. That simplification was the product.
Intercom, started by four Irishmen in 2011, did it for the conversations a business has with its customers: every channel, one inbox.
Customers took that bargain because building their own cost too much. They bent their process to fit, and kept a spreadsheet for the rest.
The bargain is wearing down
Coding assistants are the reason. A business with one or two capable developers can now build what used to need a team. To them, the twelve fields are why the product cannot hold their thirteenth.
They do not want the problem simplified. They want what is underneath: the data, the events, the rules. They will do the assembling.
So software companies may have to unravel some of their own best work. The product manager’s question used to be what to hide. It becomes what to expose.
What we had right
For Doveshield, this says we had a few things right, because we never hid much. A lot of our products are configured through a JSON file with hundreds of options. A customer, or their coding agent, can be exact about how the system should work.
The screens work the same way. We do not treat the customer like a child who has to be kept in a safe space behind strict guard rails. They get a rich control surface, not a minimal one that leaves them wondering how to do x, y and z.
And the debugging output is painfully detailed, so a customer and their coding agent can work out what happened quickly.
The other side
What stays worth buying is what an assistant cannot write: the licence, the liability, the terminal that has to keep working on a shop floor.
And plenty of businesses will never want to build. Software that is cheap to write still has to be run, fixed and secured for years, and for many of them a simple product that someone else looks after will stay the better bargain.
At the end of the day it is a trade: more possibilities for the customer, at the cost of being exposed to more complexity.
