The most useful conversation we had last year was about something we didn’t build.
Someone suggested a streak. Not unreasonably. Every product has one, they’re straightforward to build, and they do genuinely move the numbers. It went up on the board, everybody nodded, and then somebody asked what happens on a Tuesday when a parent doesn’t manage it.
We sat with that for a while, and then took it off the board.
Most of the roadmap is a list of noes
I’ve come to think the shape of a product is decided less by what goes in than by what you keep out, and that the interesting version of a roadmap is the list of things you’ve turned down and can say why.
So here are three of ours. None of them are things we can’t build. They’re things we’ve decided not to.
No streaks, and no daily targets
The problem with a streak isn’t the good days. It’s the other ones.
A streak rewards you on the days you manage it and quietly marks you down on the days you don’t, and any honest account of parenting a young child includes a lot of days you don’t. Illness, work, a late pickup, a week where everyone’s just had enough. On those days a counter resetting to zero is a small, badly-timed reminder that you fell short of something.
We’ve written a whole piece telling parents it’s fine to stop an activity early. Putting a streak counter in the corner of the screen would make a liar of us. You can’t tell someone the finishing was never the point and then keep score of whether they finished.
No progress charts, and nothing that grades your child
This one we feel more strongly about, so I’ll be plain.
TopParent doesn’t record what your child can and can’t do, and we’re not going to. There’s no chart, no score, no line going up. We won’t be telling you whether your child is where they ought to be, because that isn’t a question we’re qualified to answer and it isn’t a question a play companion should be putting into your head at half past four.
There’s a version of this product that tracks everything, produces a monthly summary and looks extremely impressive in a screenshot. We’re not building it. The moment an afternoon with a cardboard box becomes an input to an assessment, it stops being play and becomes a test that your child doesn’t know they’re sitting. That changes how it feels for them and, more to the point, how it feels for you.
Plenty of parents do want that kind of insight, and there are people properly qualified to give it. We’re not them, and we’d rather say so than imply otherwise with a chart.
No comparing your child to anyone else’s
The third one follows from the second. We don’t show you what other children are doing, or where yours sits against them.
It’s a very effective mechanic. Comparison is the most reliable way to make somebody feel they should be doing more, and feeling you should be doing more is what makes people open an app. It’s also, in my view, the single most miserable thing you can hand a tired parent, and it’s absolutely not what we want to be for.
Your child isn’t behind. They’re four, and it’s Tuesday.
What’s underneath all three
The thread running through these is straightforward enough. Every one of them works by making you feel slightly worse, and then offering the product as the remedy. That’s a real and well-proven way to build something, and we’ve decided we don’t want to make our living from it.
The alternative is harder and slower. It means the product has to earn its place by being useful on the day, rather than by making you anxious enough to come back. If TopParent helps you start one thing with your child this afternoon, we’ve done our job. If it doesn’t, no amount of counters and charts should keep you here.
What it costs to say no to these
I’d rather not pretend these are free choices, because they aren’t.
Products with streaks get opened more often. Products with charts are much easier to explain to somebody in a meeting, because there’s a visible thing that grows. Comparison keeps people coming back the way very little else does. Turning all three down means our numbers look worse than they could, and it means somebody will ship a version of this with all of it in and appear, on a feature list, to be offering more.
It also removes our safety net. Without anything engineered to pull you back, the product has to be worth opening on its own merits every single afternoon. If it stops being useful, you’ll simply stop, and we’ll deserve that. There’s no counter running to make you feel bad about leaving.
That’s a harder bar and I think it’s the right one, but I’d be overselling it if I called it painless.
Hold us to this
The trouble with writing something like this down is that it becomes a promise, and the pressure to add exactly these features gets stronger as a product grows, not weaker. I know that. It’s rather why I’m writing it down.
So if you ever open TopParent and find a streak counter in the corner, you’re entitled to send me this and ask what happened. I’d rather be held to it in public than quietly talk myself out of it later.