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I started my plea to invest aggressively in RCS with thirteen rapid-fire questions to assess your RCS readiness. Some of you shared that you had your boss’s boss Slack you with those questions seeking answers. Sorry, not sorry. The goal of the exercise is to show the enormity of the task and the need to act now. But with everything big, you have to start small, prioritize what to build, and iterate with pace. The toothbrush test is one way to prioritize what to build next. It prizes features that are low risk to build, high in their utility, and something that will be used multiple times a day.
I’ve said this before, for RCS, the delivery receipt is that killer app that passes the toothbrush test. From “The RCS Killer App”:
Once it has won over the geeks and early adopters, new technology needs to win the heart of the everyday user. You do that by solving a problem begging to be solved or improving a solution clamoring to be improved. For Rich Communication Services or RCS, that is the confirmation of a delivered text message.
Even as a first-principle, the delivery receipt (and its sibling, read receipt), is high in utility. Again from “Are You Investing Enough in RCS”:
As a first principle, messaging will endure as long as the human need for connection exists. As a second-order desire, the need to know that the message has reached its destination (delivery receipts) and that the message has been heard (read receipts) will not go away either.
Finally
Learning to say “no” and “not now” are the must-have skills for a product leader. So while you may be under pressure to implement drag-and-drop carousels, message expiry, and buttons, let’s crawl, walk, run. Start with implementing read receipts.