The Real Danger of Feature Fatigue — Why learning to play a song is more than the first four bars or mastering the chorus
Modern products are often compared to works of art. Steve Jobs even had the original Mac team sign the mold that would stamp out the cases for their 1982 computer. And just like you won’t become a concert pianist learning the first four bars of a song you won’t build a great product by building the same features you see in your competition.
Piano lessons
In my home our oldest children have all taken piano lessons. We don’t care if they become concert masters we just think that children should be exposed to music and to the challenge of learning to read music and play an instrument.
When they come home from a lesson they regularly have a marked up piece of music from their instructor. Trouble spots are often highlighted and the challenge they commit too is to spend a significant amount of time each week practicing so they can improve the trouble spots. But when they sit down to practice their effort usually plays out something like:
Start from the beginning.
Oops! Made a mistake.
Start over from the top.
Oops! Same mistake.
Start over from the top.
The net result is that a week later they are really good at the first four bars but they haven’t made much progress on the trouble spot.
You may not play a musical instrument but you’re familiar with how this works. How many catchy songs do you know the chorus cold but can’t for the life of you remember the third verse?
When we build products the temptation is to start from the beginning of the user experience as it is experience in time and try and nail down each step in order. This is why everyone has beautiful luscious login screens even when the core of the offering is a train-wreck.
Nobody gets a pass on this problem
Product Owners: How many times have you taken one more pass on nailing on-boarding when what you really should be doing is cranking out repetitions on that one feature/screen/experience you know sucks but you that you don’t know what to do about fixing it?
Front-End Devs: How much time have you spend figuring out the latest sexy animation solution while neglecting that report you know totally underwhelms?
Data Scientists: How much effort did you put into that visualization that has no chance in hell of ever being deployed? How many cycles did you spin on alpha when you know you still can’t explain why this model does what it does?
We all need to commit to going into the danger. To resit the temptation to avoid the struggle of figuring out what no one else has figured out. Every single role in your product team needs to identify where they are most afraid to look — and then you need to get out a 40 Million Candlepower spotlight and shine right down on what you’re afraid to tackle until you feel almost clinical about that trouble spot.
I believe your ability to see the nuance of the trouble spots will translate 1:1 as competitive advantage.
We learn what we rep. Repeat the right things.
New and great user experiences don’t magically appear and they don’t hit you like a bolt out of the blue. Great user experience and excellent products are the result of obsessively focusing, like the world’s greatest musicians, on the trouble spots and being ok with good-enough everywhere else.
Hell, if you’re working on something completely innovative you’re usually better off sucking at everything but that key innovation.
Every single feature takes reps even the simple ones but every time you play through the first four bars you’re avoiding the real problem and that compounds over time.
If you are working at an established company with an established product you’re stuck with being a feature factory so you can check off all the items on your customer’s checklist — thanks Gartner/Forester/G2Crowd. That’s the bane of competing in a red ocean and the sad reality of sustaining “innovation”.
However, if you’re working on what’s next then why on earth do you care about going toe-to-toe with some perceived competitor? Your challenge is not up-selling your existing client-base or cross selling into a new market.
Your challenge is getting to customer two. If you can find two you can find twenty.
If you can find twenty you’re on your way to 200!
Doing the right job
Don’t jump too soon to solving the problem of the 200 before you solve the problems facing two.
Those first few customers are golden. They are the ones experiencing real pain with current offerings or alternatives and they can help you prove out your innovative approach. Any customer willing to forgive the warts in your product isn’t hiring your product to do the job your perceived competition is doing. You absolutely must leverage that as long as possible.
Remember your innovation is your only true competitive advantage. Startups and de novo efforts don’t have the luxury of exploring the vast wasteland of feature fatigue because if you stop to play the beginning through one time too many you’ll look up to find that someone else has figured out how to finish the song.
