This seems like good content, but it feels so much like an ad.
Agreed - SO hard to read. Either it hasn’t been edited or someone thought the long winded style would keep me scrolling.
Good thoughts though as you say.
Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
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Re: Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you say sounds reasonable, but it has one flaw: That's what they're being paid for.
They might not be paying enough. It’d be reasonable to go to these small cohorts and say “our data shows these features are not broadly used, we are considering deprecating them, would you pay more to keep them?” This is mutually beneficial for both parties.
I'd say that's definitely the right way to do it.
Re: Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
#13Somewhat orthogonal to the story, but in the intro they talk about adding features and say: "Imagine the internal ‘pat on the backs’ and recognition that occurred when Gmail fully launched dark mode for the mobile app,[...] or Apple announced their M1 chip"
How is implementing dark mode even remotely comparable to launching a new general purpose CPU and transitioning an entire product line from one CPU to another?? Is changing the color on a web site that hard?
Re: Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
#14Leica is a very unique camera company in that they can get away with removing features (screens, the ability to shoot in color) while charging more .
B/W sensors have very real upsides over a color sensor if you want a B/W image.
Re: Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
#15This seems like good content, but it feels so much like an ad.
Content marketing well is an art. You have to source quality writing talent who can weave a story without it coming across as an ad.
Re: Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
#16> Even after features or products are deemed to have little to no value, teams keep them around for ages instead of responsibly removing them. The most common argument we hear is, “This [small subset] customer [sic] regularly uses the feature and we’ll lose out, if we remove it.” Instead of associating unshipping with the traditional ‘What do we lose?‘ perspective, let’s reframe to a ‘What do we gain?‘ perspective. A…
as a user it's not fun having a feature I am using disappear because I am part of only a small group using it
Apple is really bad at this with Siri. One example: For what feels like a couple of years, almost every night I'd lay on the floor and play with the cat. Occasionally I'd call out, "Hey, Siri, where is my wife?" And Siri would reply something like "She is 8.3 miles away."
This was how I could tell when my wife was about to arrive home and it was time to put away the cat toys and start making dinner.
As of a couple of iOS versions ago, now all Siri will say is something like, "You'll have to unlock your iPhone for that." If I was near my phone, I wouldn't be shouting into the air.
A LOT of Siri responses these days are, "You'll have to unlock your iPhone to do that," or "I can't do that here, but you can do it on your iPhone." I understand that it's probably for privacy (though Siri is supposed to know it's me speaking), but it makes me less likely to use Siri at all for anything else.
Re: Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
#17Somewhat orthogonal to the story, but in the intro they talk about adding features and say: " Imagine the internal ‘pat on the backs’ and recognition that occurred when Gmail fully launched dark mode for the mobile app,[...] or Apple announced their M1 chip " How is implementing dark mode even remotely comparable to launching a new general purpose CPU and transitioning an entire product line from one CPU to another??…
Because a general consumer cares about user facing features, which improve product usability.
Re: Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
#18> Even after features or products are deemed to have little to no value, teams keep them around for ages instead of responsibly removing them. The most common argument we hear is, “This [small subset] customer [sic] regularly uses the feature and we’ll lose out, if we remove it.” Instead of associating unshipping with the traditional ‘What do we lose?‘ perspective, let’s reframe to a ‘What do we gain?‘ perspective. A…
You also have to be careful about the users' trust in your product, and your brand: unshipping is a lot more negative than shipping. Do it enough and you get things like https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-... where people get to write articles about your terrible record of unshipping things.
Re: Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
#19The real reason is, adding features is simple, you just have to understand the one use-case the feature adds. When removing a feature, you have to understand all the real world use-cases, before you can kill it. This is a lot of work, therefor it is much easier to not touch it and work on the next feature.
There's a lot of accidental "features" in products, enabled by users coming up with novel (unexpected and/or unpredicted) ways to do things. It reminds me a lot of this: https://xkcd.com/1172/
A lot of this comes down to shifting the burden within responsibilities of the team. Product management having a good understanding of the hidden use cases is ideal, but really hard. Not doing that means you have Development and QA spending time on stuff no one uses.
One of the interesting outcomes is when you accidentally break a feature. If someone complains at least you know it's being used, and ideally PM starts a discussion on the real use case. My favorite is noticing something is broken while working on adjacent code, and looking at git blame to see it's been broken for months. In theory at least, that should be an easy decision to kill it; in practice my experience is everyone is always very hesitant to actually do that.
Re: Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
#20Being on the receiving end of this too many times (particular by Google), I couldn't more strongly disagree with the sentiment in this post.
Here's my message to product managers reading this: If I see you starting to regularly remove features, I will proactively stop using your product, before you get to remove a feature I rely on.
EDIT: fixed typos