To X or to UX

The dilemma of what to or not to do is a long-lived one, and in this new era where everyone wants everything yesterday, making such decisions is more science than art.

Adjacent to this, product prioritization is one of the most important tasks in Product managers ' TO DO lists. Prioritization is important because there is always so much to do and many constraints on resources such as budgets, number of developers, time to market, and more. However, a business must continue an upward journey, and to enable it, the resources should be utilized optimally and continue providing perceptible value to the users in the long term.

What comes into the product typically follows a cycle of product release, customer feedback, feature enlisting & requirement refinement, prioritization, development, and release again.

The feature list is driven by, internal stakeholders such as sales, customer success teams, and, external stakeholders such as partners and customers, who may also mention some good to have features during product showcases. All these inputs become a part of the list that a product manager (PM) must consider and make an informed decision on.  

In addition to the inputs, there is a multitude of factors that have a bearing on deciding which features or tasks to be undertaken and in what sequence. To highlight the top few:

• How many lives is the feature going to touch? Is it a niche part of the app that only a limited set of users take advantage of or is it a widely interacted piece; Is it a mass feature or an exclusive feature? Typically, a feature impacting a larger base should get larger attention and hence higher priority.
• What is the delta value for the feature? Is the feature going to take the product usage and utility from level 50 to 70 (A) or 70 to 90 (B)? Even though the delta in both the scenarios is 20 points, option A brings about a 40% change whereas option B delivers a 28% change. Greater change drives the priority of the feature up in the list.
• How vocal are the stakeholders and how many instances of such requests have been heard about the feature? Although not the best metric, it does have an impact on driving the prioritization discussions. Added to this, the level of voice certainly affects the weightage in the priority. 
• The maturity of end-users to consume/use the feature also defines if the feature should witness the light of the day or should be in the backlog. A more mature user base is likely to benefit more from some advanced features, and hence it is suggested to remind ourselves of the consumer construct of our products. How many customers are at what level of maturity?
• How long will the feature need to develop? While this is a subliminal component that all of us are always aware of, but we like to think that all features must take the same time, losing the sight of complex nature of some features compared to others.
• COST of work produced: Connected to the previous point, every minute spent on something adds to the cost and in turn the ROI. Some features will be an item for faster delivery vs. others that may need over multiple sprints to show up real value for the end consumer. It is easy to identify the ROI for a new feature as there is something to benchmark with, the last version, but for UX items that have a higher systemic impact, the ROI becomes unmeasurable and at times the value of such changes get accumulated with larger releases.

The PMs rely on responses to the above-discussed factors and a lot more and apply multiple product prioritization tools and techniques such as MoSCoW, Opportunity scoring, RICE, value vs. complexity quadrant, etc. to decide on what features/refinements should be considered in the upcoming releases in consultation with the different stakeholders. During these sessions, there are of course some reprioritization that essentially defines the product roadmaps.

That’s great about the process, and this is just a typical day in the life for any PM. But why this post?

One day during my morning coffee in solitude, I stumbled upon the thought, - if a higher CLTV can be garnered by focusing on creating new features catering to new customers OR by focusing on UX refinements that will help both their new and old customers.

I was so overwhelmed with the question that I started a poll on LinkedIn. I put this poll on my profile and across a few product groups. In the 7 days that the poll was live, I was able to collate over 200 responses across 3 different channels. I was excited to see the number of responses that the poll was able to garner. Before we come to the results from the poll, let's scratch the surface from my perspective.

Let me start with a blank page for a business when it is new and doesn’t have any users/customers yet. At such stage, which segment is more important, “Customers” or “Happy Customers”? Well, there are no "happy" customers unless you have “customers”. So, you need customers, and that’s that.

Looking at the scenario, some months/years down the line when you have acquired some customers it's a decision between incorporating new features that you know would excite customers vs. fixing UX for the released product. This now becomes a dilemma, which of these two should one consider now?

I could enlist some pros and cons for both these routes from a CLTV perspective. As the great saying goes, let us begin with the positives.

Pros of working on new features:

• New features if included basis customer research are likely to increase customer acquisition. A FEW features may WOW the potentials in the market by being a one of its kind in the market and may bring in a huge number of leads. However, these are likely to be very few and must be in the base product itself. On similar lines, one may also reach back to old connects who denied the first connect owing to the lack of feature and add on to the revenue streams.
• New features also provide the ability to percolate deeper into old accounts with cross-selling and upsells opportunities. Increasing penetration amongst existing customers.
• New features also allow for the possibility of price changes. This one is mainly for B2C customers, however, a pricing decision for B2B products will need to have a drastic impact and will need a business justification keeping in mind the different pricing strategies used such as licenses, tiering, and more.

Pros for UX fixes and improvements:

• Improved UX as the name suggests will lend to a better experience, leading to more engagement, more adoption of the product.
• Happy customers are more likely to continue with you for an extended length of time, a direct indicator of potential higher CLTV
• Just like any product, a great experience lends itself to word of mouth from engaging customers and is likely of bringing in more customers. Again, more from a B2C perspective, but it is still organic. The WOM also plays an astounding role for B2B products that work across verticals in the organizations and can cast its shadow on improving efficiencies or any other important needle.
• A happy customer also leads to ensure lower retention cost and in turn higher profitability
• UX improvements also allow the dev teams, time to undertake tech debt reduction tasks to improve the long-term scalability of the product. Tech debt is one of the biggest challenges many organizations face, and owing to the hidden nature of things, the same bloat up under the covers only to emerge later in the days with a daunting effect on the product. 

What about the cons for new features and UX improvement sprints? There could be more, but I was able to identify only a few.

CONS of new features:

• Higher acquisition costs, leading to low ROI for the business
• Possibility of the tech debt pile up

Cons of UX improvements sprints:

• The opportunity cost of new customers and revenue streams 

I might seem a bit biased towards cons but it’s difficult to find contrary points for something we all know we must undertake. Also, the number of pros outweigh the cons for “UX refinement” by a higher margin than that for “new features”. In addition to this, the reality that you only must make such decisions a few times in a product lifecycle (hopefully) calls for thorough analysis before deciding one way or the other.

Before I close, let us see the poll takers' opinions. About 2/3rd of the respondents think the new features to be more important than the UX fixes and refinements. The respondents were a mix of product managers, product owners, and individuals with other important roles in the organization not specifically a connection with the product. 

If it were to me, I would fix the known loopholes and UX issues in the product rather than picking up a set of new features as I would want my current users to be satisfied than those who are still not on my product.

Another contributing factor for the decision is the amount of time that the team will have to spend on new features vs. fixing the old ones. While It is true it is difficult to fix a bad code than to write a brand new one, it will certainly be a lot longer to run through a full feature development cycle. When I add the time to define and refine user stories, the tech architecture review, the actual dev time, QA, and follow it up with marketing and GTM timelines for a big feature, my time spent on fixing UX issues compares to a minuscule number.

Additionally, if you look at the monetary side of things, UX refinements turn out to be a lot efficient in driving ROI than the work on new features. Think about the value of effort spent (man-hours X dollars), and the marketing dollars that could be saved for a few sprints or a product launch and directing them towards the fixes that will enhance your product value for the users and in turn provide you with a greater LTV in the coming period.

As PM’s we are always expected to put up a number/metric a KPI to devise a strategy to lead decisions. For most things, it is fair to rely on some numbers too, as they can be derived from various resources. However, the UX challenge and the silent repercussions that it may have in terms of adoption and engagement can have a daunting impact on the product and company. Of course, the team can take the middle path of working on new features and UX together, but it may end up harming the things more than making them better.

Just like most things product, there is no single correct response to this question, and the situation defines the approach each team must take. In my limited experience, leaving a product with the customer with a bad UX is like a ticking time bomb! I would certainly avoid them and keep my PEACE with existing customers and look to prioritize new features into a better base product. 

Please feel free to share your opinions. A dialogue will certainly help refine thoughts and make me and a lot more folks like me out there a better product manager. 

A sincere thanks to everyone who participated in the polls.