We are days away from fielding the ability to turn your google Inbox into a SaneBox.

Back Story: This post is about SaneBox a fairly new product which (with 2 clicks) “labels” the envelopes in your google Inbox so that you immediately know what is important and what isn’t. It’s also about how to decide what your small development team will work on.  And finally about how to stay true to a product vision while allowing it to evolve.

In the beginning of this project, my email-overloaded friends told me labels only - never touch their google Inbox!  I really took that to heart.  Everything we did was enforced by the need for a very light touch.  I never wanted to be the guy that “touched” their Inbox.

Two months, 100 users, a zillion man hours, and a lot of conversations with those 100 users later: I have decided that the next optional feature will be the ability to actually turn your google Inbox into one of our folders.  This means that with a click we will file the less important mail directly into Sane folders.  As a nod to my original vision, with another click you can turn it off and we will put those envelopes back. But this is definitely “touching” someone’s Inbox. Optional, consensual touching. But, touching non-the-less.

So, were my email-overloaded friends wrong?  Was I wrong to listen?  Were they right and this is a complete waste of precious corporate resources?  

The first step toward this decision was a vocal minority of my users have asked for this.  So this obeys Stu’s new rule #1: only build things people want to use right now.

By implementing this feature, the users will have to click less to get the same results. Their “new mail” count will finally be a count of important mail. Thus, It obeys Stu’s new rule #2: always make the product easier to use.

The second step in this decision was that one of my beloved don’t-touch-my-inbox friends AIMed me the other day and asked was this feature possible.  I took a screen shot because he had been so adamant before. In the end, the pain of trying to get to his SaneTop folder on his blackberry had turned him around. (Upon further reflection, he decided he didn’t need the “extra” folder he was suggesting.)

To make this decision, I had to consider the other priorities.  Small team.  Only so many hands.  My priorities have been accuracy and scaling.  Accuracy because otherwise the product is meaningless. Scaling because I have another zillion users backed up waiting for an invitation.  But neither scaling nor accuracy is evolutionary and I absolutely feel that the business MUST evolve. And it must do it organically based on what the users need.

Anyway, in the end it was the click of a mouse, turning a Trac ticket to “blocker”. Hopefully it was the right click.

I think it was because I have been using the new feature on my own gmail account which runs off of our development machines and after 24 hours in this mode I will never go back.