There are things everybody agrees would be useful and nobody ever uses.
That is a much more important distinction than it sounds.
You can build something clever, solve a real problem and show it to sensible people who all nod and say, yes, that's useful. They may even tell you they would definitely use it. Then you put it in front of them and nothing much happens. They carry on doing whatever they were doing before.
From a product point of view, that is not a minor disappointment. It is evidence.
The reverse happens too. Plenty of things get used constantly without being especially useful. Habit is powerful. Entertainment is powerful. Convenience can carry a product a very long way. Something can occupy hours of somebody's week without making their life appreciably better.
What interests me is the overlap between three much less glamorous questions: does it work, do people actually use it, and can the thing support a viable business?
Get all three in the same place and a clever idea starts looking like a product.
When the map stopped being a map
I had one of those moments while working on Festival Explorer for Music Kite.
The original description was ordinary enough: build a festival map. Festivals are big, people need to know where things are, so put the useful things on a map. Fine.
Once real coordinates sat underneath the artwork, the feature changed. A stage could be a real place connected to its schedule rather than a decorative marker. Areas, vendors and facilities could belong to the product while the illustration remained free to look like the festival.
The map stopped being a picture of the event and became an interface into it.
I remember getting genuinely excited when that became clear. Not because I had discovered maps, and not because putting data on a map is new. A fairly ordinary feature had opened a door into something much more useful.
That sort of moment is catnip to me.
It is also exactly where I have to be careful.
Clever is a terrible success metric
There is a particular danger when you like building things: capability itself is satisfying.
I can make this work feels like progress. Sometimes it is. It is not the same as somebody needs this.
Festival Explorer can be technically impressive and still fail as a product. If somebody arrives at a festival, opens it once, thinks it looks nice and never touches it again, the engineering may be impressive but the behaviour is telling me something more important.
The questions that matter are mundane. Will people actually open it when they arrive? Does it make navigating the site easier? Is the live information useful enough that they come back later in the day? Does it still earn its place when the signal is poor, the weather is dreadful and everybody is trying to find the same thing at once? Does an organiser gain enough from supporting it to care whether it exists next year?
And because Music Kite is a commercial product, there is another question I refuse to treat as embarrassing: can there be a sensible business underneath it?
Creative and technical people sometimes talk as though commercial viability corrupts a good idea. I think that is backwards. If you are building a commercial product, viability is one of the conditions that allows the useful thing to continue existing.
A feature that costs a fortune to maintain, is used by almost nobody and cannot support itself may still be a lovely experiment. It just is not necessarily a business.
Saying you would use something is not usage
This sounds obvious, but it is one of the easiest traps in product work.
People are generous with hypothetical enthusiasm. I'd use that. That's brilliant. You should definitely build that.
Those reactions are not worthless. They can tell you that somebody recognises the problem or understands the idea of the solution. What they cannot tell you is what that person will do when the thing actually exists and has to compete with everything else demanding their attention.
The useful signal is when somebody uses it without being asked. Then comes back. Then reaches for it again because it has become part of how they do something.
Eventually there is an even stronger signal: they notice when it is missing.
That is a much harder standard than approval in a conversation, but it is also much better evidence.
It is why I increasingly separate three questions in my own head. Is this useful? Is it being used? Is the behaviour around it strong enough to justify continuing to invest in it?
Those questions stop me confusing enthusiasm with adoption and capability with demand.
Reusable capability creates leverage
Festival Explorer held my attention after I understood the immediate technical problem because the underlying capability turned out to be reusable.
Once I could see what the spatial layer made possible in one context, I started seeing other places where the same approach might solve different problems. Some of those ideas are still unbuilt, so I am not going to turn this into a shopping list of things I might make one day. Ideas are cheap enough already.
But reusable capability matters.
I do not mean everything needs to become a platform. Sometimes a button should remain a button. Sometimes a one-off solution is exactly what it should be. The useful question is whether solving one genuine problem has created a capability that can solve another genuine problem without becoming an excuse for endless architecture.
That is leverage, and leverage is exciting when it is attached to real behaviour.
Without the behaviour, it is just an elegant way of owning more code.
Useful. Used. Viable.
Technology is moving quickly enough that novelty is permanently available now. There is always another model, framework, database feature, rendering technique or device that makes something possible that was awkward six months ago.
That is wonderful. It also means possible has become commonplace.
The harder part is deciding what deserves to survive contact with the real world.
So the filter I keep coming back to is deliberately simple. The thing has to function properly. It has to matter enough that people genuinely use it. And, if I am calling it a business, there has to be a viable way for it to keep existing.
I am not looking for something that merely makes people say, that's clever.
I want something useful enough that they reach for it again. Useful enough that it becomes part of what they do.
And useful enough that, if you take it away, somebody asks where it went.