If you've baked a cake recently, how did you do it?
Did you buy all of the ingredients, follow a recipe to put them all together, bake it, decorate it and enjoy it?
Did you buy a cake mix, maybe add a few things to it, bake it, decorate it and then enjoy it?
Or did you go to a local bakery (or Costco), buy a ready-made cake, bring it home, and enjoy it?
Products and services typically come in one of three frameworks: do it yourself, done for you, or something in the middle.
Each framework has a different experience, effort level, and cost.
DIY'ers love the experience of doing things themselves, from materials that cost less compared to buying a ready-made product, but they spend a lot of time and effort putting it together.
Compare that to the convenience of having something already made – it comes at a higher cost, you don't get to tinker with anything, but it's done and you can just enjoy it because it's already done for you.
These two frameworks have a middle option, at least when it comes to tech related solutions. Automations and AI. With automations and AI, you have the ability to affect what the end product will be (rather than just getting a completely made end product), but you don't spend as much time and effort having that product made.
Think marketing materials. The brokerage I work for created a solution that allowed real estate agents to build their own marketing materials. They still had to put the effort to pick and choose and customize what they wanted their marketing materials to look like. But they didn't have to start a design from scratch.
The next step above that, though, is a completely done for you solution, where they don't have to think, or choose, or fiddle around with anything. The marketing materials are done, ready made, already customized based on their preferences.
The choice of framework depends on the end user. Do they want to make things, or do they want things done for them? This is something you need to ask when building something for your users.
Do you like to make your cake from scratch, start with a cake mix, or have a ready-made cake done for you?