More Isn’t Always Better
One of the biggest lessons you learn as a product manager and/or business owner is that adding more functionality to your product or service doesn’t always make it better. If it’s not directly improving the customer experience, building your traffic, or most importantly, bringing additional revenue in the door, you need to take a step back and ask why you’re building it.
“More” usually comes in two flavors; “shiny new thing” and “more of the same”.
Shiny new things are always fun. It’s great learning a new technology and imagining how you could implement it. You picture yourself speaking at a conference with all of the latest cool companies and being written up in TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb. The thing is, implementing a shiny new thing for the sole purpose of it being shiny and new without any specific value to your customers doesn’t mean anything. If anything, you’ll find that 9 times out of 10, your shiny new thing just increased your customer service calls as they’re not sure what the shiny new thing is or does.
More of the same has got to be better, right? It’s more of what your customers want or use. If we let them enter 3 details on this form, they’ll love it if we let them enter 12. Not quite. The remember when you’re building something for your customer is that it should be there to make their lives easier and take up less time. Having them spend the same amount of time on your product or service that you originally saved them isn’t doing anyone any favors and your customers will start to ask themselves if the benefit they originally perceived is still there.
I’ve worked in my own startup, a medium sized business and a large corporation. Of those three, the startup and the large corporation are the best environments for making you focus on building only what will bring in more revenue. With a startup, you only have so much funding runway and time. Everything you build needs to have a strong reason and quick return. With a large corporation, things are so slow and bureaucratic that it’s a struggle to get anything actually implemented so you need to focus only on the things that will make an impact. It’s when you’re a growing small to medium size business that it’s difficult to avoid the sirens’ call of the “shiny new thing” and “more of the same” because you still have most of the agility AND the funding. That’s when you’re most likely to find yourself building that one year project that nobody really wants.
More is not always better. Does the new functionality improve your customer experience and prevent them from leaving? Does it make your customer’s life easier and allow them to focus on their core business? Does it bring more traffic to your site? Does it generate more revenue or lower costs? If whatever you’re building isn’t doing any of these things, you should probably stop working on them right now and focus on the things that do.
