Earlier this week, a post from Tukan Das, CEO of Leadsift, inspired me. Here’s what he wrote:

‘The best way to stop “feature bloat” at your company is to slightly change your perspective around releasing new features.

Every feature is an Experiment designed to test a Hypothesis around a Customer Problem. Therefore, the success of that feature should solely be measured by the change in customer behavior this feature Results in.’

I’d love to add to this. And that’s about changing your perspective on who you focus your development on and who not.

Here’s the thing

Too often, we don’t pay enough attention during the sales cycle to which customers have the highest potential to become fans. Instead, we’re going on with a mindset to sell no matter what.

Unfortunately, this results in an inflow of customers who are not in your sweet spot and often have a bigger chance of churning sooner rather than later. 

These customers will (even if you’re lucky they don’t join with a lengthy addendum to their contract with feature requirements) distract your R&D department and roadmap with feature requests that only serve them, eating up a large chunk of your capacity by “fixing gaps.” 

Even if you’d approach this as an experiment designed to test a hypothesis around a customer problem, it’s taking focus away from the mission. Overtime this will even frustrate your biggest fans

Question for you to reflect upon

What % of your roadmap gets bloated with features for customers that would have been better off with the competition? 

What if you could devote this effort to features that your fans would keep talking about because of the difference it makes for them?