There was a time when features were a competitive advantage. Where every feature allowed you to do something that was previously impossible. It didn’t matter whether a feature was hard to use because the only alternative was that you didn’t get to do whatever that feature enabled you to do.

However, for most things, that era is now behind us. The limiting factor in most consumer products today is not CPU power or RAM or the number of software features. It is the interface between the machine and the human using the machine. The bottlenecks of our age are empathy and imagination, not features.

Today, we live in the Age of Experiences. Features are commodities. And, like all commodities, they are not a competitive advantage. The competitive advantage of our age is the experience. It is a holistic thing. It is a scary thing because crafting a good one involves constantly thinking about these scary things called humans who are emotional, irrational, and unpredictable.

Much easier to think of database schemas and communications protocols instead; at least they are logical, rational, and predictable. And yet, understanding humans must be central to our process if we are to create expriences for them that are enlightening, empowering, amusing, and perhaps even delightful.

Aral Balkan.