Launching Is A Bet #

Building a new version of a product comes with a lot of anticipation about “What is going to be new?”, “What is going to be kept as it is?”, “What is going to removed?” and the most important is “Are we going to delight our customers or make their lives worse?”. These questions surface uncertainties about the future and your job is to reduce it for your team, so that they know what to build, and for your customers, so that they know they still can rely on your solution.

When building a new feature, how much of it is a something new and how much of it is an adaptation of an already existing concept or a mix of a few concepts brought together in a new fashion. The more amount of newness you build, the less amount of all kinds of details should be introduced so that your customers can grasp and understand the bare bone concept. On the flip side, the more common the feature the more bells & whistles you can add. Take for example the Hey Email Client which introduces many features not present in any other email client right from the first release of the product because everyone already knew how email works. But when the iPhone 1 was released it was a leap forward compared with other smartphones but an unusable smarthphone by today standards, maybe it is good that they released it without the App Store because it might have been too much to bite at once.

If building new features seems hard, removing them is twice as hard. One reason for that is that you have to carve that out of the existing product and who knows how many other features expect the other feature to exist. Another reason is that you will have at least one user that uses that features which is the only one making your product worthwhile for them. If I were to lose a good feature, that makes the whole product work for me, for reasons other than reasonable ones like high rate of malfunction I would be angry but if I didn’t have had that feature at all I would be just annoyed for not having it and it is clear by now that an angry customer takes action online but an annoyed one just goes on with their life. So deciding what new features are built is even harder because what they sound very cool but are unsustainable on the long run and you have to remove them.

Now, what about the things that we keep the same? How many of your users will be satisfied with the current feature set forever, no matter what other products’ feature set is. And, are you keeping the feature the same because it makes sense or are you unaware of what new features other products are adding that your users will benefit from? A perfect example for this is the recent move to “Everything Collaborative” and “Everything Social” breaks the experience of many users that want to left alone in their digital corner. 

Distinguishing between nice to have features, trends, and what you want your product to provide will help in the process of deciding what to keep, what to add and what to remove on a new version of your product. Having this clear will also remove the amount of risk on the bet you are taking with the new release and give you more confidence that the next milestone is worth the effort.