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I strongly disagree with this sentiment. I’ve seen quite a few features added simply ‘because we can’, without any thought to ongoing maintenance, support, or
by dillonmckay 7y ago
I strongly disagree with this sentiment.
I’ve seen quite a few features added simply ‘because we can’, without any thought to ongoing maintenance, support, or additional infrastructure requirements/costs.
A little bit of common sense and forethought can go a long way in preventing unprofitable or revenue-decreasing features from being added to the product.
If you keep adding features, without increasing your conversion rate or user revenue, you are simply decreasing your profitability.
Death by a thousand cuts.
- lazyjones 7y agoYou are basing your sentiment on assumptions that cannot be verified in practice without implementing/releasing the features. Nobody wants to implement revenue-decreasing feature but nobody knows beforehand whether they will increase or decrease revenue. So such statements are useless.
- dillonmckay 7y agoThis is not accurate at all. Approximate costs can be estimated before hand. You can even ask the customer if they are willing to pay a specific amount for the feature. But, insisting you have to build and deploy a feature first, before you have any idea of its impact, that is, an expensive, and foolish way to learn.
- joegahona 7y agoThere are lots of ways to test and to map potential features to customer problems. Launching features because _you_ think they’ll resonate with users is a complete crapshoot. More often than not, people inside the company are way too close to the product to be able to determine which features are the right ones. I recommend “The Right It” by Alberto Savoia, “What Customers Want” by Tony Ulwick, and “The Lean Product Playbook” by Dan Olsen if Cutler’s essay doesn’t convince you.