Recently at work we looked at a couple of vendor products to help our growth effort. Once I saw the pricing quotes I started thinking about the value we would get. The products do different things so it was hard to compare the prices and values.

The first product helps us with our BI effort; it helps us understand the analytics data we have. That information could help us improve our product for our users. We already use another product from this vendor so the implementation would be trivial.

The second product adds features within our product UI. It helps us improve certain parts of our product experience, and that would help our users get more engaged with our product. This would be a brand new tool for us so it would take more time to implement.

Both products provide value for us. But as soon as I started thinking about how our users would benefit from the products, the comparison became much more clear. The first product would be easier for us to implement, but it would require a lot more work to convert the information we get out of it to actual changes in our UI for our users. The second product takes more work initially, but results in immediate changes in the UI that directly help our users.

Thinking in these terms, I prefer going for whatever helps our users directly.

Related:

• Second-order thinking
• The phrase “operation was a success, but the patient died”