Sample frameDay 340·Product · Restraint

Good morning. The feature that wins the deal and the feature that keeps the customer are rarely the same feature.

Product.

Feature Fatigue

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The question

Of the last three things you shipped because a prospect asked for them on a sales call, how many of the customers you already had have opened any of them since? You don't have to guess — the number is sitting in your analytics this morning, and it's almost always a good deal lower than the person who asked for it would believe.

The idea

In 2005 three marketing researchers — Debora Viana Thompson, Rebecca Hamilton and Roland Rust, then at the University of Maryland — published a paper in the Journal of Marketing Research that named something everyone had felt: feature fatigue. Their experiments did what most product research doesn't bother with. They asked people to choose a product, and then asked them again after they had lived with it. Before use, people reliably preferred the model with more capability; loaded with features, it simply looked like the better deal, so they picked it. After use, the ranking inverted. Usability now dominated satisfaction, and the feature-rich option they had chosen themselves was the one they liked least. The follow-up in Harvard Business Review in February 2006 was titled Defeating Feature Fatigue. The trap is that both halves are true at once and they arrive at different times: capability is what gets bought, usability is what gets renewed, and only the first has a salesperson reporting back on it. So the roadmap fills with things that close deals and empties of things that keep customers, and every quarter the call looks right.

The framework

01
Every feature is charged to someone who didn't ask for it.
The cost of an addition isn't the build; it's the millimetre of clarity taken from every existing user who now has one more thing to look past. That cost is invisible in the meeting where the feature gets approved, because the person who wanted it is in the room and the thousand people who'll step around it are not. Nobody in that room speaks for the customers who wanted nothing added, so before you approve, name what those thousand pay: a longer menu, a slower first run, one more decision on a screen that already had enough of them.
02
Did they ask for it, or did they use it?
Pull the numbers on the last five features you shipped — how many accounts have touched each in the past month — and the ranking will usually have nothing to do with how loudly each one was requested. Then set the same test in advance for the next one: the pre-commitment you already apply to an experiment, applied to a feature. What's different here is whose usage counts. The account that asked will adopt it whatever it turns out to be, so the threshold has to be a share of the customers you already have, by a date, not a nod from the requester. Settle now which of three things happens if it misses — it goes behind a default, it gets retired, or it stays and somebody writes down why.
03
Defaults, not deletions.
Removing a feature people depend on is expensive and slow; hiding it usually isn't. Most fatigue lives in what the product shows by default rather than in what it can do, so the first pass is to move the rarely-used behind a setting, a menu or a second screen, and leave the common path clean. That recovers most of the usability without the support load of a removal — and where something turns out to have almost no users at all, you'll have the numbers to retire it properly.
04
Sell the capability, ship the restraint.
Thompson, Hamilton and Rust's finding isn't an argument for a thin product; it's an argument for separating the two audiences. Buyers want proof the thing can do whatever their future demands, so let the sales surfaces carry the range — the integrations, the edge cases, the settings they'll never open. Users want the ten minutes after they log in to be obvious. A product can serve both, but only if someone is explicitly accountable for the second, because the first already has a revenue number attached and a person whose bonus depends on it.

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