Live data from Hacker News

How do you build a bare minimum feature?

shavinpeiries.com

21–23 of 23 posts

Re: How do you build a bare minimum feature?

#21
post #4
post #2

> Do you find it difficult to ship? Not really. Every successful company I’ve ever been at has sold the product before building it. Small companies do it directly with customers, large companies do it with focus groups or A/B testing. You can also do it with ads, make a lead gen ad for your feature, call the people who enter their info and sell them. The goal on any call is to close. Either you sell them on your feat…

Hi, do you have a blog or some place where you write about these topics?

Just here, no blog.

Re: How do you build a bare minimum feature?

#22
post #2

> Do you find it difficult to ship? Not really. Every successful company I’ve ever been at has sold the product before building it. Small companies do it directly with customers, large companies do it with focus groups or A/B testing. You can also do it with ads, make a lead gen ad for your feature, call the people who enter their info and sell them. The goal on any call is to close. Either you sell them on your feat…

This leads to building a feature factory. It's a more sales driven development approach. You'll eventually hit a scaling problem making it too concrete for some people or worse when there's a misfit between what the customers abstract representation of the feature request is vs. what you actually develop. Which then leads to more costly changes.

Re: How do you build a bare minimum feature?

#23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another 'tool' I've used in the past: We had customers that wanted 'permissions' for their "sub" accounts so they could have fine grained access to features. They would threaten to not use our system until this was implemented. Implementing this feature was a lower priority and more difficult to implement for us then other revenue generating features (also a good way to prioritize things). The interesting bit is they…

How do you avoid promising or implying shit you don't intend to deliver? I'm going through this right now — people trying to use super-fine permissions (dozens of points!). Besides role-based groupings, there's no chance this fixes more issues than it causes in my case (less technical managers and workers using an SaaS). Any ideas and insight appreciated!

Hey dude, please check this out. Basecamp had a similar issue but the underlying cause was very simple and was fixable within a day.

https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.2-chapter-03#narrow-down-the-...

Post reply on HN