Vanity Engineering

Vanity Engineering is the software world’s equivalent of keeping up with Kardashians.

It’s the art of solving problems no one has—or designing features because they make your product look “cool.” Or, at least, that’s the hope.

The problem is that customers are weird. And demanding. They never act as grateful—or are as easy—as you’d like them to. To make it worse, they’re often right.

A few years ago, we designed a SaaS for aesthetic clinics. For the next release, we were busy adding colors to make charts “pop.” Somehow, sanity prevailed, and I decided to speak to a customer. Admittedly, feeling quite smug and hoping for glorious praise.

She instead asked. “Do you know that your app doesn’t support regional date format? I am in friggin Australia, and it uses US dates. What do I do with that?”

If you are a founder in a startup gladiator arena, it is easy to fall into the vanity engineering trap. But your users aren’t here for the drama. First and foremost, they want a solution that works.

No one has ever canceled a subscription because the charts weren’t the right color. But they sure have for an incompatible date format.

Trust me, I know!