Over the last few months, I have been involved in “relaunching” existing online products with the aim towards making them usable and intuitive to our customers. Not too long ago, I was interviewing a user who had been using our product for about 3+ years. As I was showing him the wireframes, at one point he pointed at a feature and said “It’s great that your introducing this features, I can see myself using it”.

Such a positive reaction normally brings smile to my face, but in this instance it did not! – reason being that the feature in question had been in the product for atleast last 5 years. As I interviewed more customers it became apparent that this was not an isolated incident and that mere act of “repositioning” and “highlighting” certain aspects of the product had a profound impact on what customers perceived they could do with the product.

The lesson to be learnt is that it is important from time to time take stock of “features” that are not being used by our customers. Some of it could be down to the fact that it is not relevant to certain groups of users. However, it won’t be unusual to find features which although relevant and useful are not being used either because they have not been properly designed or emphasized within the product. Identifying and developing such features first will ensure that we don’t continue to add more features without first deriving maximum value from those already in the product.

Feature Creep

For a Product Manager receiving regular customer feedback is crucial and is integral to the good product development process. However, it is essential that each request be evaluated on merit as opposed to it being based on how soon we can get the guys in IT to implement it.

The rigor applied to deciding if a feature, which takes 2 weeks to implement should be no different to one that takes 2 days or 2 hours.

A simple and effective way to literally “push-back” on features is simply to ask details about the customers asking for them. It isn’t unusual to find statements “Many customers are asking for it”, “I have had many customers ask for it within the last 6 months” to be exaggerated. It is often the result of comment received in the last meeting + ones personal preference.  The simple fact is that a business case cannot be based on anecdotal evidence.

Although, there is a danger in “pushing back” and being branded as unresponsive and forever stuck in analysis. It is important to note that its an effective way to stop your product from being bloated with too many features. From a efficiency/usability perspective too many features are just as bad as too few features.