Stop Building New Features If You Want To Have A Great Product
Okay, maybe that is not entirely true, but it is pretty close.
Like every market, the technology market is a extremely competitive place to operate in. Users continuously demand and expect better from the products they use while internal stakeholders need the right tools to remain ahead of competitors and continuing to fuel business growth. We should be very grateful to these people for this continued demand, because without it, we would never be driven to engineer better products and solutions.
But when driving ourselves to build a better product we face a very real conundrum
Build a new feature or improve an existing feature? Every product manager and engineer will have faced this situation. Many times. And it will never stop.
My view is simple. Improving user experience is the better option 80% of the time (use the other 20% to create new features).
Make no mistake, there have been many, many occasions where I have prioritised building and releasing a new feature over making an improvement in user experience (I am actually cringing inside at the hypocrisy of writing about not prioritising new features, but it is only through not following my own view that I have truly learnt the truth behind it). It is very easy to do. New features are exciting to build and release. They can create a lot of excitement internally and externally; new features are labelled as innovation, something very product manager loves hearing about their product (very few new features are truly innovative in my view).
However, if we are brutally honest, very, very few new features have close to the same impact on increasing repeat usage, what every product manager and engineer should be relentlessly focussing on, as improving existing product experience. Hubspot talk about the ‘Flywheel’ in which the objective is about removing any point of friction in any part of the client journey. The more friction points that are removed, the faster the flywheel moves and the faster the business grows. Looking at this from a product perspective, the only way to really remove friction is to relentlessly focus on your existing product and truly understand how it us used, and most importantly, where your current product is creating friction for users, making their experience less enjoyable (and therefore less likely to be repeat users). By understanding and removing these friction points your product ‘flywheel’ moves quicker and quicker, gathering momentum which is measured by increased users on every turn.
New features actually slow down growth. They add additional friction points to the flywheel, slowing it down - the exact opposite reason new features are usually added.
I am not professing that new features should never be built. New features are very important and need to be part of the continued evolution of every product. But when your roadmap becomes dominated by new features you have to be able to step back and think of the flywheel. Is that new feature removing a friction point for your users or simply adding another friction point in? In most cases, it will be the latter.
This is definitely not an easy conversation to have (when is anything great ever easy). New features are easy to sell and market. But. Get the flywheel moving as quickly as possible, and your existing users become your sales and marketing engine. The fastest growing products we see today are growing at the speed they are because we love using them and we tell others that through the countless communication mediums we have available to us.
Get that flywheel spinning.