As a product manager, you often feel a strong urge to define features. The more features you design, the more accomplished you feel, believing you’re providing more value to the customer and covering every conceivable need or preference.
In reality, it is often the contrary:
Increased Complexity: Additional features increase the complexity of the solution, often negatively impacting the user experience by overwhelming users. The experience can become so convoluted that it detracts from the core value the product was meant to provide.
Opportunity Cost: The capacity used for these additional features could have been allocated to more valuable tasks, such perfectionizing the most impactful features.
Maintenance Costs: Increased complexity results in higher maintenance costs.
Early in my career, I worked for a private bank that developed a new quarterly investment portfolio report with complex analyses. Many customers didn’t request this level of detail and eventually asked for a simpler report—just an overview of their total asset value and performance. When a survey was sent out, a large majority of customers preferred the simpler report, even though it contained all the information available in the full report and at no extra cost. This shows that customers often prefer simplicity over completeness.
Simplicity can be beautiful. A good example is Google’s homepage, which has remained famously sparse, focusing primarily on its core function: search. Despite the complexity behind the scenes, the simple and clean interface has continued to be a hallmark of Google’s approach to product design.
By focusing on a smaller set of impactful features, you can concentrate your resources on perfecting them. This approach often results in a product that aligns more closely with the core needs of its target audience.
The million-dollar question is: which are the impactful features to concentrate on? This is easier said than done, requiring a continuous feedback loop from your users and an iterative trial-and-error approach.
Customer Interviews: Interview your customers and capture their feedback. Focus on the underlying needs rather than just their wants or recommendations.
The customer always has a problem, he is trying to solve with your solution. This is what the customer is an expert in. The solution to solving the problem should be your expertise as a product manager. The main objective of an customer interview should therefore be to crystalize which problem the customer is facing, not in designing the solution to solve this problem.
Some quotes to highlight this:"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." – Henry Ford
"People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page." – Steve Jobs
"The customer is not always right. We’re fond of saying that the customer is always right, but of course that isn’t true. Sometimes the customer is misinformed or confused." – Warren Buffett
Iterative Trial-and-error Approach: Once you fully understand the problem in-depth, you can start thinking about features to best resolve it. A trial-and-error approach, working iteratively, should be applied here:
Prioritize Features: Use tools like feature voting, customer interviews, and market research to determine which features are most valued by your customers.
Regularly Review and Prune Features: Establish a routine to review existing features and their usage. Removing seldom-used features can reduce complexity and improve focus on what truly matters.
Test and Validate Assumptions: Before adding a new feature, validate its necessity through A/B testing or MVP (Minimum Viable Product) versions to gauge user response and effectiveness.
Embracing the "less is more" philosophy in product management is not about doing the bare minimum; it’s about focusing on what truly adds value to your product and your customers. By reducing complexity, focusing resources on what really matters, and enhancing usability, companies can create products that not only meet but exceed customer expectations.
In a world where everyone is adding features, the bold move might be to refine and reduce—to do less, but better. This approach requires courage and a deep understanding of both the product and the customer. By choosing to focus on quality over quantity, product managers can create products that stand out in a crowded market.
Comments
Post a Comment