So What?
The Importance of New Feature Launches
As a product manager, I’ve learned that sometimes the hard work my team and I put in for months behind the scenes can go to waste without a properly planned launch; that hours of dev work can boil down to just 2 minutes when determining the success of a new feature/product.
Let me show you what I mean by that:
I had just finished a company-wide presentation for a new feature — we surfaced property mortgage data alongside our property sale data. This project took our developers about a month of work to clean and map the mortgage data from multiple 3rd party sources into our customized CRM in a singular, digestible manner for our brokers to see and use. Our developers had done a great job and handed it off to me to announce this new feature to the company. I thought the presentation went well and I was about to wrap up when our CEO stepped in and asked me, “So What?”
My college improv classes somehow kicked in and I was able to blurt out a bunch of random facts about mortgages and how knowing certain facts can help you uncover new leads. But needless to say, I didn’t satisfy his question. The Zoom meeting ended, I let out a defeated sigh in my studio apartment and embodied the face to palm emoji.
In retrospect, the ‘So What?’ for this feature was simple: by surfacing mortgage data alongside property sale data, our brokers can double the value they add as an advisor to an owner by having both sale and financing knowledge at their fingertips . If an owner is not looking to sell their property, our brokers can still offer financing advice and showcase B6’s main advantage — our cross-department teamwork.
That was my first data focused feature launch and I forgot the most important and basic rule about product launches — lead with the end in mind. Why will this new feature help your customers win more business?
For us, the B6 Engineering team, our customers are our own B6 Brokers and their business is closing sales of commercial properties or financing the debt on them.
Most of our brokers don’t care about where and how this data got to them. They don’t need to, nor do they have the time. And that’s how it should be — they’re busy trying to add value to their clients. We’re here to support them.
As a Product Manager at B6 it’s my job to manage the Engineering team’s Agile workflow — the full circle of determining the roadmap, researching solutions, tasking team members to develop, testing, and launching the new product or feature, and then gathering feedback all over again.
Looking at the diagram, you can see that the left side of that agile circle is very customer heavy. Meaning, my time is spent with the brokers, understanding what could empower them to get and close more deals, or make them more efficient in their day to day.
Once I do that, I bring it to the right side of the circle and work with our Software Engineers and CRM Administrator to determine practical solutions to actually bring the broker’s needs/wants to life.
When I’m over on the right side, it’s easy to get bogged down in the logistics and the nitty gritty details on how the feature will actually work.
The point I’m trying to make is while the right side of our workflow is obviously incredibly important in actually building and delivering the products, our end users frankly don’t care about it. In fact, any extra information will only distract them from the main benefit of the product in the first place and reduce our chances of them jumping in to use the new tool because all of us have a finite source of attention.
For most of your customers, this is their first time seeing it. They don’t know what you’ve been doing behind the scenes or why, they just know what you’re presenting in those 2–5 minutes.
It’s crucial to keep the launch focused on the simple fact of why the brokers should want to use the product. Framing everything with the end in mind, or the, “so what?” of your customers’ business. Tell them why this will help them close deals.
Even more, with every new feature and product, we are likely about to add work to their already maxed out workloads. The user is required to invest time of theirs into learning a new tool with the promise that once they do, it will save them time in the future or generate more deals. No matter how big or small or great the new feature is, it will mean time directed away from something else in the short term — something else that currently works.
The feature should be simple and useful enough that launching with the “So What?” is easy for you, and exciting for them. If you can’t convince your users that they should want to use the feature, then you shouldn’t be releasing it.
I know this post may be dramatic for the discussion of 2-minute feature launches (the metaphorical cherry on top of all your team’s hard work) but the importance should not be understated. Clear, concise launches, allow us to objectively judge the efficacy and quality of our products.
While it’s unlikely that a great launch will turn an objectively bad product into something our customers will use and love, it’s possible an uninspiring or convoluted launch can result in less than expected user adoption on an objectively great product — a total lose lose situation for both our team and our brokers. So now — ever since my zoom-choke moment with our CEO — all of our builds start and end with 5 extra minutes to ask ourselves the simple question — ‘So What?’
