Do it Wisely

My nephew is the golden child of the family.

My niece gets the short end of the stick. It's not that Dan is better, it's that Sara isn't as diligent in certain things that please parents. Sara is a star athlete, and very popular in school, Dan gets great grades and excels at keeping his room clean.

Sara is organized and keeps her room in shape, but not like Dan. When you walk into his room, the bed is made and the closet has perfectly ironed clothes standing in formation.

My heart is drawn to Sara.

She has a great sense of humour, and even though it is a little unfair that Dan gets away with a bit more here and there, she takes it in stride. I can sympathize with Sara because I know the dangers of not being perfect in everything you do, especially in those areas of life where everyone could be watching.

When I make a feature in my database, I expect it to be perfect – even in areas where everybody could be watching.

Elasticsearch is a database that works like a Google search engine, enabling applications to add a Google like search bar.

When I decided to include full text search in my database, just like Elasticsearch, our goal was to be as competitive with Elasticsearch that no developer would need to install it alongside their RavenDB database.

I refused to release the feature until I could give developers this confidence.?

Every Small Detail Must Have a Big Impact

A lot of products reach too far. They create features half-hearted and all you get are things that are sub-standard, incomplete, that require customers to pay more money for because the next update has twice as much memory requirement which speeds up the price meter of their cloud platforms.

New features can require a lot work just to make their feature usable. Like my nephew, they get away with it because they are the “cool” kid – or the more “popular” brand name.

That doesn’t bother me.

Plenty of my users have left “popular” databases to save on these very developer costs. They migrate to RavenDB because our features are designed to work flawlessly without any effort on their part.

It's the difference between buying a motorcycle ready for riding, and having Amazon deliver five boxes of motorcycle parts with some tools and documents on how to put it together.?

What it Means for You

It’s tempting to want to offer everything.

It’s even more tempting to take something almost done and offer it up as another reason to buy your product.

The test is not to let your users touch it until you can guarantee there won’t be any headaches involved.

A single bad experience can destroy your brands reputation. Even as the core of your product is as solid as it ever was, a poor feature can call all of that into question in the eyes of your audience.

Let the builder beware.?

Oren Eini?is the CEO of?RavenDB, a NoSQL Distributed Database, and RavenDB Cloud, its?Managed Cloud Service?(DBaaS). Oren is a Microsoft MVP and a DZone Hall of Famer with over 3.5 million views over ten years writing about NoSQL Database Technology, the .NET Ecosystem, and Software Development. He has been blogging for more than 15 years using his alias?Ayende Rahien.