Use Case, Operability, & Compliance

I categorize product features into three groups:

Use Case: Features and capabilities that allow a user to achieve a goal.

Operability: Features that protect the availability of the use case features. Backups, monitoring, scaling, and similar concerns.

Compliance: Features that are constraints (and honestly, overhead) that don’t directly contribute to use cases or system availability. Audit logs and embedded notices like privacy policies are examples.

All products have elements in all three categories. Compliance can be tricky - it’s the easiest to naively defer, since it may not seem needed in an MVP. But you need to know the requirements of a given context. Many jurisdictions are subject to GDPR or CCPA, and ignorance is not a valid defense for non-compliance.

I first learned the term operability from Tony Hansman. Here’s a post that describes it well.