Your next product feature kind of sucks, sorry

It's Monday morning. You're excited because you've been 2 days away from your precious roadmap. It's a thing of beauty. Each feature and experience crafted with love. Like children growing up and leaving the house, you're excited to watch each delivery spread its wings and carry itself to a bright future for customers and the business.

Or maybe not.

If you're a product manager, designer or digital leader who's ever thought "THIS feature is going to really change the game", then this message is for you.

In digital teams, new designs, features and experiences can be crafted at a speed that makes other industries blush. One side effect is that it's much easier to move from idea to production directly and keep shipping the next new thing.

Relentless velocity is used as the theme when you hear truisms like 'move fast and break things', however just shipping new features doesn't line up with what the data tells us about real digital products.

A study by pendo in 2019 found that 80% of the features in digital products were never or rarely used. The cost of building these features for software companies was estimated to be over $29 billion. What this tells us is that over 3/4 of the time spent designing, developing and launching new features is wasted - and could be better spent!

So here's the problem - which feature on your backlog is going to be a waste of time and which is going to move the needle?

There are 3 factors that will massively increase the rate of real winners and decrease the time you spend on duds. The trick is to believe in a process of delivery, rather than getting hung up on specific features.

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1. Relentlessly experiment

The fastest way to find out if your new loyalty program may have cut=through is not to build a bunch of customer journey flows and automated triggers, it's to set up an email input field that says "Register your interest to hear from us about rewards."

Launching experiments in between the feature design and build step means that the features that make it into your crowded backlog are ones that have validated impact with customers and are the most likely to be change makers. Ranging from larger-scale complete feature tests through to 'painted-door' style tests like the one outlined above, you can apply experimentation to new features at any point in the idea generation cycle - and happily move on if they don't show the results needed!

While many digital teams may run experimentation as an integrated function with delivery, through feature flagging, the vast majority of teams could take advantage of more simple web-based experiments as an input to pre-validate what actually matters to customers and to the business.

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2. Challenge assumptions

"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so."

Last year I had the pleasure of listening to a talk by Scott Shillinglaw from Koala that left a mark on me. One key message was to regularly ask some of the most experienced and senior people in the business what they just 'know' for a fact about customers, how they buy or their needs. Capture the top 5 things and test them.

Almost always - you'll be surprised (and I hope delighted) to find something brand new and wholly unanticipated about your customers. Our knowledge is built on itself, over time and we rarely get the chance to truly challenge a bedrock assumption we've made, that may be leading us down the wrong path.

Find the time to challenge core assumptions - and you'll save time in dozens of releases.

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3. Distance emotionally by forcing X-functional involvement

This is not life advice! However, in the context of delivering new features, it's easy to become wedded to an idea, design, or feature. Especially if it was you who came up with it!

While entirely natural, it means that you, like all of us, will push features that won't matter because you like them, or you'll block features that will be very valuable for the same reasons.

Distancing emotionally doesn't mean turning on 'robot mode', rather it means trusting in a process and forcing cross-functional teams to be a part of the feature ideation, design, experimentation and release. The alternative perspectives that other team members provide acts as a weather vane for getting too caught up in one idea, while sticking to the process means more than just going step by step - it means accepting that many of the features you launch won't matter!

With that mindset, the focus becomes on ensuring that features are prioritised based on data and customer insight, ensuring testing before moving into build and continuing to measure post-build for performance changes.

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By taking a few simple steps you can change the story about your team, and be spending more time on what will matter, and less time on 'busy features'.