The Beetil Blog
Blog » Staying true to our vision by saying no
We’re committed to making sure Beetil is the world’s easiest to use IT service management solution.
That for us is a simple, easy to understand vision, that guides how we develop and grow Beetil going forward. You can be sure there’s a big list of features or enhancements or even little tweaks that could or should be added to Beetil. Everyone has their own pet wants or little things they’d like added to their favourite applications. It’s really important for us to challenge everything that gets added into Beetil to stay true to that vision.
Something came up today during the refinement of Beetil’s customer portal. The customer portal provides a way for external customers to log incidents, and keep a watch of and contribute to the discussions and resolution of those incidents directly within Beetil. We were considering whether to implement a (simple) checkbox to allow specific discussion comments to be private and not visible to the customer. This had been a feature request to allow hiding of unnecessary technical detail from the customer, among other reasons.
The customer can see an audit trail of recent activity on their incidents, and people with an incident on their watchlist can be notified of activity. Implementing that simple checkbox means a bunch of business rules need to be implemented to i) prevent the customer from seeing the comment in the portal, ii) prevent the update from registering in the customer’s version of the audit log (otherwise they’d see activity, but no evidence of that activity), and iii) to prevent the customer from getting notified about the changes. And there’ll be this checkbox on the the web form that the user won’t necessarily understand how to use or why it’s there – so we’ll need to provide help and educate the user. Not only that, we spend ages talking about the impact of this (simple) checkbox, and testing all the different permutations.
Wow, our simple checkbox isn’t so simple anymore. For the feature, that’s likely to be used infrequently anyway, it’s going to take time, cost money, and ultimately increase the complexity for the users and for ongoing maintenance of the system.
Always saying yes to features means we’ll end up with a bloated product full of bells and whistles that in many cases would only get used occasionally anyway. It would no longer be intuitive or simple to use, and would be like many of the other products out there in the marketplace.
Sometimes we have to say no to new features. Sure, we’re going to disappoint people sometimes. But what’s really important is for us to stay true to Beetil’s vision of being the world’s easiest to use IT service management solution, and always check whatever we’re doing is ultimately aligned in that direction too.