are you rounding up or down?

When you’re building a new product, you may be looking for a niche the market hasn’t served yet. Often this means your new thing is a variation on an existing thing. 

I’ve found it useful to look at existing products and ask if I’m rounding up or rounding down from one of those. When you round up, you add features or you increase the quality of existing features. When you round down, you remove features, or decrease the quality / intensity of existing features. This rounding decision can guide your design choices.

You may discover as you listen to your customers/community that you thought you were rounding up one version of the thing, but your audience is drawn to a rounded down version of something else. 

At COVIDCheck, we originally thought we were rounding up on a bundle of public health tools - offering school districts the insight and power of a public health agency in a slick, all-in-one tech platform. Over and over again, we found that the schools and businesses who wanted our service wanted a rounded down version of a clinical visit. They wanted reliable COVID testing their people could access via drive-thru, with results returned the next day. They didn’t want to manage contact tracing systems and symptom attestations and sophisticated data dashboards. 

Once we realized this, we were able to focus on delivering that rounded down thing cheaper, faster, and better. That wasn’t easy or self-evident but it meant our effort (which we were going to pour in either way) was more useful to our customers and had a greater impact on our mission.

-eric