Don’t Help Your Users, Keep Them
Are you dying to help customers?
The best gift a great product can give to its customers is surviving long enough to continue serving them.
There is never enough time and always far too many great ideas when building a product. Good teams are able to use heuristics or basic reasoning to weed out unworthy features. But this isn’t enough.
Beneath these clear decisions are trickier ideas I’ll call “convenience features.” These kinds of features masquerade as valuable and low cost. But, in fact, they are unnecessary and costly to maintain.
These features merely help users while adding bloat to your codebase and shortening your runway. What do I mean by that? Well, the question you’re answering is, “Will this feature benefit the user?” Absolutely! But…
That’s the wrong question.
A great dev team will instead ask, “Will the user leave if this feature is never built at all?” Can we leave it out and still keep the user? If the answer is not a resounding “no,” the feature is unnecessary.*
Here are simplified examples:
a. Form enhancements. These are pretty straightforward to dream and build. And forms are always painful for users. But users expect them to be painful and tolerate them as long as they…
