Coates: Only progressive disclosure and app ecosystems let software scale from SMBs to enterprise
Glen Coates · Glen Coates: Why Shopify Will Dominate Amazon; How Microsoft Made Smartest Move of 2023 | E986 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 8, 2023 · at 19:44
Glen Coates is VP of Product at Shopify. He outlines how software products maintain core simplicity while catering to vastly different customer sizes.
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“The only two pieces of leverage you really have to allow that stretch is one is extremely good execution of progressive disclosure in the core product. So like features that appear at the right time only when you need them. A good example of this is something like the canonical example of this is like users and permissions management in business software, right? Like when you only got one user, you literally do not need user and permissions management because there's nothing to do, right? So the user permissions management thing being there is like literally making the product worse because there's nothing to do and it's just adding complexity, right? So Part A is progressive disclosure of like what I would describe as anti features, like a feature that makes the product worse by being there because it's not needed yet. And then the second thing, which is probably the bigger piece of leverage is an app platform and an app ecosystem, right?”
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