When I was growing up, General Mills marketed Kix cereal as “Kid-Tested. Mother-Approved.” This catchy product marketing approach took into consideration the needs of two different but equally important stakeholders for their product. If it’s been a while, you can watch the commercial here:

Kid-Tested Cereal

Kids are the end-user of cereal. They want something tasty, with a pleasant texture, in a colorful box. I picture General Mills scientists feeding Kix to kids in a lab and measuring their responses.

Mother-Approved Cereal

Mothers are the ultimate decision-makers for cereal purchases, and they are also accountable for the nutritional health of their children. I picture mothers reading the detailed nutritional labeling, running some calculations, and coming to the conclusion that Kix adequately satisfies their nutritional standards.

Kid-Tested, Mother-Denied Cereal

What cereal has the ultimate user-experience, but no nutritional qualities? The fictional cereal, “Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs” from Calvin and Hobbes.

It’s funny because it’s so extreme. I’m not exactly sure how or why Calvin’s mother bought this for him, but it clearly meets his every delight and expectation.

Kid-Failed, Mother-Approved Cereal

What cereal tastes terrible, but is incredibly healthy? The fictional cereal, “Colon Blow” from Saturday Night Live, circa 1989.

This ridiculous parody captures the ultra-healthy messaging of high-fiber cereals that were marketed to adults, not kids. Even the adults expected them to taste terrible.

Now that the trip down memory lane of cereal marketing and parodies is complete, let’s talk about how we build technology.

Kid-Tested, Mother Approved Technology

Kid-Tested technology means we have an amazing user-experience that is responsive, engaging, and intuitive to use. You don’t need a training manual to figure it out, and it enriches your work life so much that you tell your friends about the innovative creations of your amazing IT department.

Mother-Approved technology has to pass security and compliance tests. It needs high-availability and disaster recovery. It needs to be free of technical debt. It needs to be fully automated into your CI/CD pipeline and deployed to immutable servers. In other words, it needs to satisfy all of the non-functional requirements that are really good for enterprise health.

If we develop technology like Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, our end-users will love the initial sugar-rush, but won’t enjoy the crash that follows. If we develop technology like Colon Blow, it’ll pass every audit and test, but it won’t generate the business value because no one will want to use it.

Kix is the perfect cereal. It’s the dead center of the venn diagram and avoids both extremes. No one in their right mind would develop Chocolate Frosted Colon Blow. That satisfies no one. Kix gets it right.

What technology products are you working on right now? Do you have the right mix of Kid-Tested and Mother-Approved? Now’s the time to do a taste test with your end-users and read the nutrition label to your auditors. Based on the feedback, you may need to make some tweaks. Keep your focus and you will deliver the Kix of technology products: Kid-Tested and Mother-Approved.