Google won by doing one thing

My golf coach told me something in month 2 that I’ve never forgotten: stop trying to fix my grip, my stance, my swing and my tempo in the same lesson.

Pick one. Fix it. Groove it in. Then move on.

I didn’t listen at first. I wanted everything sorted by Saturday. 3 months and a fair few wayward shots later, I finally understood why he kept saying it.

What did Google do differently?

When Google launched, most search engines were trying to be portals: weather, news, sports scores and stock tickers, all crammed onto one homepage.

Google did one thing; it searched (that’s the whole pitch).

Rory Sutherland points to research on what’s sometimes called “goal dilution”: people assume something built to do only one job is better at that job than something trying to do several. He illustrates it with electronics shops. Combined TV and DVD players always sit at the shabbier end of the row. Nobody’s tested the picture quality. They just assume it, and walk out having bought 2 separate devices instead.

Google’s single-mindedness wasn’t just cleaner design. My read is it worked as a trust signal too, whether or not anyone at Google set out to build one.

What does the research say?

This runs against most product instincts. Add a feature, capture another use case, become the “everything app”: the roadmap almost always points towards more, because more looks like progress on a slide.

But every extra promise a product makes is one more thing customers check it against, whether they realise it or not.

A knife that also opens bottles usually opens bottles worse than a bottle opener. A gym that’s also a coworking space usually does neither particularly well. The instinct to add “just one more thing” taxes the thing you were already good at, a little more each time.

What’s my take?

Back on the course, my coach’s rule turned out to be the same rule Google stumbled into by accident: doing one thing convincingly beats doing several things adequately, almost every time.

The hard part isn’t spotting this. Most people running a product could tell you their focus has drifted.

The hard part is which feature you’re brave enough to cut... especially the one that took 6 months to build and still has someone internally attached to it.

If you had to strip your own product or service back to the one thing it does better than anyone else, what survives?

What’s the one thing your product, or you, do better than almost anyone else, once everything extra gets stripped away?

Mark