The next feature fallacy: Summary of a talk by Stefan Schuessler
Rolf Schulte Strathaus
Building innovative products for trade fair management and logistics/transportation
Fighting “The next feature fallacy”: Summary of the talk by Stefan Schüssler at the Working Products Monthly on April 26th
On April 26th we had Stefan Schuessler (LinkedIn?as a guest at the WP Monthly. Stefan is Product Leader and Mentor, B2B Product Expert, Data Products and knows quite a bit about Fintech.
The video of the event can be found in the?Working Products Community
Summary
Stefan of course first explained the term?Next feature fallacy. Other word for it would be?build trap?by Melissa Perri .
With the?Next Feature Fallacy?Stefan describes the phenomenon, when product teams think/hope?With the next feature comes success". This happens especially when the product is not as successful as expected. Instinctive reaction:?The killer feature is still missing.
So ask users, or look at what brilliant feature the competitor has, and then build it…
But that usually doesn’t work. Stefan then presented a few approaches on how to get out of the “build trap”. To my delight, his mantra was:?Talk to your customers!
From my point of view, this is of course completely logical and also quite easy to do. But from the four “Key Lessons” Stefan then presented, I concluded that often the basics of good user research are simply not there and need to be practiced.
Lesson 1: Talk to the right people
Very important: Make sure to talk to the right people!
Don’t forget any group because it may be difficult to find those people.
Above all, include the non-users. You can learn a lot from them especially…
Lesson 2: Asking the right questions
Only by asking the right questions will you get good insights.
It’s all about finding out the “why”. That’s why do your homework beforehand and look into the data.
And of course, listen and don’t defend your own product.
Lesson 3: Asking in the right way
These are now the elementary basics: ask open-ended questions, be responsive to interview participants, and probe to really get to the “why.”
After all, I’m a big fan of observing a lot and paying attention to reactions and behavior. When you ask, you always get answers…
Lesson 4: Draw the right conclusions
This is where the shit hits the fan in many product discoveriers... How do I manage to draw the right conclusions from the team interviews together?
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After all, it’s not about building what the users say (hint: faster horses...), but about identifying needs and finding the best solution.
Stefan’s credo: There are always many solutions to any problem. It’s about finding the best solution. This can only be done by sorting out and trying out!
Build-Measure-Learn
Actually Build-Measure-Learn is “Industry Practice”. But you have to be very careful that the “build” part is not disproportionately larger than the measuring and learning.
How often is a feature that has just been built really validated again in user interviews? Are users really satisfied/enthusiastic?
Here are the slides of the presentation:
The discussion
Even after Stefan’s presentation, there was still a lot of discussion. It became clear that there is still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to customer centricity in agile. Here are three of the topics that were discussed:
How do you reach dissatisfied users or even non-users?
In order not to be blind in one eye, it is extremely important to also talk to users and customers who are either dissatisfied or do not use the product (anymore). Creative ways are needed here to find these people. Besides involving customer support, you can of course also search in the wild. Depends pretty much on the product. You find the people if you know who you’re looking for.
How do you involve other areas and stakeholders?
Ultimately, customer understanding must be promoted in all areas. User research is a perfect way to involve stakeholders. Only through joint observation and solution development are true innovations possible.
Practical tips are: Make interview dates public. Invite people. Perhaps in conjunction with a breakfast. And persevere. The number of guests and listeners will increase as word gets out about what can be learned from the interviews.
How do you integrate user-centeredness into processes?
It was lamented that there are not yet good established frameworks for integrating user feedback. One approach was discussed more intensively: Dual Track Agile, i.e., dovetailing Product Discovery and Product Delivery via two sprints running in parallel and with a time lag.
Oliver Pitsch gave a good presentation on this at Working Products 2021. We then went into more depth on this in a WP Monthly. Here you can find the summary, the slides and the video: Dual Track Agile at WP Monthly
The approach is also not that simple. It happens very easily that discovery and delivery are done by two different teams. You have to prevent that organizationally. The customer/user empathy has to be transferred to the whole team.
My 5 cents
I really enjoyed the presentation and the discussion. Customer empathy, user research and the involvement of the entire team and stakeholders have been my core topics forever.
Stefan’s four key lessons showed me that there is still a lot of room for improvement in user research. You can and should learn the tools. It is important to observe customers together as often and regularly as possible. The difficulty lies in keeping an open mind and really listening. Operational blindness is a professional disease.
Product managers or UX-people should definitely not conduct interviews about their own products! You are simply too close to your product, start to defend your product and can no longer listen. It’s better to observe the interviews together with the team on the other side of the “digital mirror”, take notes and evaluate them together afterwards.
If you have any questions, just contact me. Or book an appointment.
Next Monthly on May 24: Jens Scharnetzki , Chief Product Owner & Experience at Yello Strom
Date: May 24th
The monkey images pulled from: The three monkeys of strategy by Sattar Khan
CPO and independent Product Coach, Freelance Consultant
1 年Thanks Rolf, for having me on your monthly. I really enjoyed the discussions and different perspectives on this topic. One big learning for me was, there is quite a complexity that depends strongly on your organisation. BUT, however you make it happen, continuous product discovery is the key to build meaningful products and escaping the build trap. I was very impressed how you are already advocating it for years and still do it in Eparo! We need more of this!