'If Your Product Is Great, It Doesn't Need To Be Good:' When Gmail Creator Paul Buchheit Took Aim At Tech's Obsession With Features

Paul Buchheit, the engineer behind Gmail, once challenged the popular wisdom in tech product development with an essay where he argued that a "great" product needs to do only a few things very well.

What Happened: In a 2010 blog post, Buchheit discussed the common criticism of the first iPad, noting that the backlash echoed early responses to the iPod.

"The negative responses are so perfectly misguided that it would be wrong to waste this opportunity," he wrote. He referred to a now-famous Slashdot review of the iPod that read: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." Similar critiques of the iPad focused on what it did not have rather than what it did well.

Buchheit wrote that successful products didn't win by piling on features. "Those missing features are typically available in a variety of unsuccessful competing products," he wrote.

He illustrated his point by citing Gmail's stripped-down launch: "It was fast, stored all of your email (back when 4MB quotas were the norm), and had an innovative interface based on conversations and search."

He recalled that even the address book, a feature many considered fundamental, was built in just two days. "The engineer doing the work originally wanted to spend five days on it, but I talked him down to two since I never use that feature anyway," he noted.

Why It Matters: Buchheit articulated his belief that the "more features = better" mindset led otherwise smart people to build bad products.

"If a MacBook with OSX and no keyboard were really the right product, then Microsoft would have already succeeded with their tablet computer years ago," he observed. Instead, he urged creators to narrow their focus and execute well: "Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else."

"If your product needs ‘everything' in order to be good, then it’s probably not very innovative," he warned. "Put another way, if your product is great, it doesn’t need to be good." In his view, solid products succeeded not by being exhaustive, but by excelling at the essentials.

Despite Buchheit's references to Apple Inc. AAPL products, his speedy approach seems to contrast the company's visionary co-founder Steve Jobs' process of dedicating "hour after hour" to product design.

Earlier this year, Microsoft Corp. Co-founder Bill Gates even shared an anecdote about how Jobs suggested that he do hallucinogenic drugs to have “more taste” when designing Microsoft products.

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