Product Housekeeping — Clean up that Feature Overload!

This article by Dharmesh Shah got me thinking. As a product manager, I have always focused on adding new features to the product. The story is similar for most product managers. While in B2C , it can be a PR competition “My product has n features more than them” — “First one to launch feature x”; in B2B, the focus is on what the client wants “Client A wants this feature — Add it!”

No one really focused on cleaning up what was not needed anymore

Businesses are replaceable in this world where technologies evolve everyday. With the advent of the cloud and advances in SaaS, migration is very easy. Organisations fear that taking away a feature may take their customers away — why take the risk? Why take something away from the customer?

No one really discusses removing a feature unless the technology really becomes obsolete and having it in the product seems medieval. But give it a thought — You are not taking away your core offering from the customer. You are reducing the feature overload. You are making your customer’s life easy by taking away something that was good to have on your catalog but hardly (read never) used by more than 1–2% of your customers.

I would like to consider this as a housekeeping activity. Every product update has some hits and misses. Hits are obvious; the misses may or may not be so obvious. So how do we decide why and when should we bid farewell to a feature?

To find the misses for a consumer technology product, look for customer reviews. You may release multiple features in a release. Some may be the highlight of the product release, some may be hidden in the menu. Listen to what the customers are saying about your product. Has anyone noticed that tiny option in the settings menu? Has anyone appreciated or belittled a feature. Use data to identify how many users are using it.

When it comes to B2B, encourage your sales team to get regular reviews from your customers, set up meetings with the actual end users of your product; hear what they have to say. This will give your valuable information about whether that feature you added to your product to make your product pitch look impressive is actually of any use to your end user. Taking that away may actually imply one lesser click for a more useful feature.

Let’s call these features “NEGATIVES”.

Here is what Negatives do:

1. Add additional cost as time spent on testing, documenting, troubleshooting and supporting it in fututre releases
2. May make user experience less pleasurable
3. Use up product real estate that could have been allocated to a more useful feature
4. Add to the app/product size

The solution provided in the referred article is straightforward and makes sense

Decide a “minimum bar of usage/value” that every feature must pass in order for it to remain a feature. If a new feature doesn’t hit that bar in some set period of time, prune it.

Support those efforts to prune where pruning makes sense. Acknowledge that there will be some short-term pain, but that the long-term value is worth it.

Create a culture that rewards the heroic efforts of those that fight as hard to take features out as they do to add features in.

If organisations can implement this and create a culture that encourages regular product housekeeping, it will help product managers to think even more carefully before adding a feature to the product. Subsequently, the requirement for housekeeping would also be reduced and so would the burden of feature overload

This post is my first attempt at contributing to the Product community and would love your feedback on my views. Would love to hear more opinions on this topic. Do recommend this article if you like it.