The Next Feature Fallacy
andrewchen.co
The Next Feature Fallacy
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#2I've seen this fallacy used in startups by technical (co)founders to justify procrastinating various other, "less interesting" parts of the business that are vitally important. I've done it myself more times than I'd like to admit.
It is very easy to say "I need to add/improve feature X, fix bug Y, or refactor Z" when what you really need to do is outbound sales activity, balance your books, or write blog content. You may already not enjoy those activities because they are some combination of hard, not fun, and something you don't really understand. Couple that with some engineering task of perceived equal importance, that you do know how to make progress on, and you can almost convince yourself its really not procrastination.
The best solution I have seen is to track progress on a macro level, so that product advancement is put on par with the other critical activities of the business. Having someone kick your ass when other areas slip is very helpful.
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#3While I thoroughly enjoyed this blog post, this seems to not be in the spirit of Hacker News: https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/605422107028131840
"Can I ask people to upvote my submission?
No. Users should vote for a story because it's intellectually interesting, not because someone is promoting it." via https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#4The other side of the coin is that there are many products that lack that one feature that makes me not use them or makes me less interested in using them.
Example is sorting products by some variable or filtering products by some property. If I can't do that, that means I have to write a greasemonkey script and it is much easier to go to a competitor.
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#5Interesting insight with the "engagement wall" concept, but I wonder if following this idea means you spend more time in "viral" features without adding meat to your product basics. In the long run, you really want engaged customers rather than casual customers (unless perhaps you can monetize the casual users somehow).
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#6While I thoroughly enjoyed this blog post, this seems to not be in the spirit of Hacker News: https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/605422107028131840 "Can I ask people to upvote my submission? No. Users should vote for a story because it's intellectually interesting, not because someone is promoting it." via https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Upvote begging (and knowingly using the /newest trick) is pretty unethical, although fortunately uncommon in HN.
I'm working on a blog post about the problem of upvote begging. Usually, it's in the minority of users, although some websites don't explicitly enforce it well. (Case in point, Product Hunt makes upvote begging part of the status quo, which compromises the integrity of the site as a whole.)
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#7The other side of the coin is that there are many products that lack that one feature that makes me not use them or makes me less interested in using them. Example is sorting products by some variable or filtering products by some property. If I can't do that, that means I have to write a greasemonkey script and it is much easier to go to a competitor.
And related, removing a feature will almost certainly cause you to lose some users. And since users are hard to acquire, this is a big deal.
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#8While I thoroughly enjoyed this blog post, this seems to not be in the spirit of Hacker News: https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/605422107028131840 "Can I ask people to upvote my submission? No. Users should vote for a story because it's intellectually interesting, not because someone is promoting it." via https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Upvote begging (and knowingly using the /newest trick) is pretty unethical, although fortunately uncommon in HN. I'm working on a blog post about the problem of upvote begging. Usually, it's in the minority of users, although some websites don't explicitly enforce it well. (Case in point, Product Hunt makes upvote begging part of the status quo , which compromises the integrity of the site as a whole.)
It's common because the likelihood of escaping /newest on the basis of "intellectually interesting" alone is miniscule. The traffic just doesn't work that way.
Solve that, and you have much more traction to complain about what people should or shouldn't be doing.
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#9We've been guilty of this over at http://www.staffsquared.com. It's far too easy, and sometimes fun, to build better/more features than the competition. It's equally difficult for the sales department (and me at times!) to say "no" to new feature requests from potential customers.
Conversely, the work to deep dive in to customer usage metrics that tell the story of how users use the app and reach their "Aha!" moment is comparatively dry and time consuming but nonetheless essential. We've set up a number of KPI reports which tell a detailed story of where our triallists and paying customers spend their time in the app and extract value.
We use a combination of Google Analytics and custom KPI reporting to watch customers use the app. We've tried 3rd party apps, like Intercom and Mixpanel but keep returning to google analytics.
So the good news is that we've identified key KPIs that tell us how likely a trial is to convert. For example, we know that a triallist that has logged in more than x times is > 90% likely to upgrade to paying. This is powerful, as we don't invest time attempting to sell to these. Likewise, we now automatically filter out customers that are not at all engaged with the app, and aim to sell to just those that sit between the two extremes. We've also taken the time to customise life cycle e-mails to triallists according to their levels of engagement. Again, very time consuming work but essential and very rewarding when the results are positive (more no/low touch upgrades = more £'s).
Obviously all traillists regardless of engagement level get top notch support. However I'm sure more sales intelligence could be shared with the support team as they're also key to the selling cycle, albeit in a more reactive manner. Support also need to feedback to the onboarding team, as support are front line for people who get stuck and frustrated as a result during a trial.
I could talk at length on this subject, conversion rate optimisation is something enjoy and definitely don't spend as much time as I would like actively working on...
Re: The Next Feature Fallacy
#10While I thoroughly enjoyed this blog post, this seems to not be in the spirit of Hacker News: https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/605422107028131840 "Can I ask people to upvote my submission? No. Users should vote for a story because it's intellectually interesting, not because someone is promoting it." via https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I agree the call to action was very specific ("dear HNers"), but I think we all assume that authors promote their own writings via many channels.