Great Products are Opinionated
I was listening to the “Sinners” episode of “The Rewatchables” on the drive into work this morning and it had me pondering one of my favorite parts of product development: being opinionated. I don’t know any great products that aren’t opinionated. I don’t know how to build products that have a chance to be great without making them opinionated.
Bill Simmons, Van Lathan, and Wesley Morris were largely showering Ryan Coogler’s masterpiece with well-deserved praise, when in the midst of reviewing the most rewatchable scenes, Morris takes issue with The Scene in the movie:
I just wanted the whole song uninterrupted by the weight of the future and the past. I just didn’t like it. That sequence is so up my alley, my entire intellectual project, right? One of the things I care most about as a critic, and for me not to like it, something is going wrong.
Everyone who has seen “Sinners” knows the scene I’m talking about. (If you don’t, stop reading and go watch Sinners. Seriously, I’ll wait.) I thought it was one of the most extraordinary pieces of filmmaking of the last 25 years. Maybe more. But for Morris - whose awesome podcast Cannonball is literally about culture and history — it failed. In the discourse about the movie, audiences seem fairly divided about it.
What’s so awesome is that Coogler — a director under 40 who’s literally batting 1.000 with over $2 billion at the global box office — obviously knew it would be divisive. That it would split audiences. That he was going for it.
Thank goodness. It might not have worked, but a “Sinners” that didn’t go for it wouldn’t have been the remarkable movie he delivered.
Going for it
Friends and I have had similar discussions around great food. I was incredibly fortunate to eat at David Kinch’s remarkable restaurant, Manresa more than once. What struck me every time was how every meal, every course, every idea represented Kinch and his team expressing incredibly strong opinions. And every time there was at least one course or flavor that polarized our table, that led to discussions during and after the meal about the choice, about how we experienced it.
Like in every other creative endeavor, there are safe choices in dining. Kinch never made them and it made the Manresa experience mindblowing.
Opinions are like…
One of the reasons it was easy to shake hands with Ken and join SmartNews was the mission:
Delivering the world’s quality information to the people who need it
That’s a wildly opinionated mission. Both quality information and to the people who need it require products with incredibly strong opinions. Our just-launched news app, NewsArc, is our best attempt yet to embody those opinions. It is absolutely certain that some potential users won’t want information ranked by quality. Won’t want the shared, communal view of news NewsArc focuses on.
That’s OK. In creating NewsArc we believe enough American news consumers exist who do. We’ll see. “Strong opinions, loosely held” of course — but so far we’re thrilled to see how people are reading, exploring, and sharing the news!