Product Decision #8: The Impact of Rdio’s Focus on Non-Essential Features

This is #8 in a collection of posts highlighting decisions made in tech to build and grow products.

Product Decision

In the article “Why Rdio died”, members of Rdio’s team highlighted a product decision they made as an example of what worked against their efforts to focus on building the best possible music streaming service. They talked about a feature that allowed users to drag an album or playlist into their queue, but it ended up being way more work than was worth to their users. The decision to prioritize work on this feature was an example of a lack of product focus on the most strategically beneficial areas.

Details

The Verge explains one contribution to Rdio’s eventual demise:

“Looking back, some former employees say Rdio sometimes focused on the wrong things. It invested many product cycles in refining its queue — a place to collect things you want to listen to later. Every other music streaming service offers a queue that’s a simple list of tracks. But if you dragged an album or a playlist into Rdio’s queue, Rdio would recognize it as a distinct object, so you could drag and drop an album above a track, or a full playlist below an album. “At the end of the day, that was not a major differentiating factor,” says Wilson Miner, who led design at Rdio from its launch until May 2012. “If we hadn’t had something like that, nobody would have noticed and it would have been fine. I still wish we could have solved it, but it was more of a personal quest than a brutally honest assessment of priorities.”

Read the full article here.

Have you ever faced a similar situation at your company? If so, share your results in the comments.