How do you know that a new feature will benefit the product and not harm it?
When a product enters the market and finds its target audience, the work on it doesn’t end there. Entrepreneurs and products are always looking for ideas to add value to users.
How do you know if a feature will appeal to consumers and be useful to them? To do this, use the feature / product fit criterion. It helps determine the value of a new feature and its impact on product development as a whole. Below we will talk in more detail about this indicator, and also give some interesting examples from practice.
What is Feature / Product Fit?
Regular product improvement is a way to develop and attract new customers. If you don’t add new features to your app or service, sooner or later the audience will leave. They just get tired of using the same, or a competitor will appear who will make it cooler.
Therefore, teams are constantly looking for new ideas for additions and their implementation. The main problem is the lack of understanding of what will push the product up and will please users, will be valuable to them and will help solve problems.
The process of assessing the usefulness of a new feature is, in general, similar to determining whether a product meets market expectations. But there are also some differences.
There are three main components in defining product / market fit:
Return. Share of customers who have developed a habit of using the service and regularly interact with it.
Monetization. Opportunity and specific ways to make money on user habits.
Attraction. Based on the first two points, they determine the optimal strategy for attracting a new audience.
By the way, we recently discussed in detail what product / market fit is, what it is for and how it is measured. We recommend reading for a better understanding of the value and usefulness of new features.
Feature / product fit shows whether the new feature fits into the overall product concept:
The functional must have its own return mechanism.
There must be its own measurable activation.
The functionality should improve the return, engagement and / or monetization of the main product.
It’s great when a new feature attracts new customers and they regularly interact with it. But a release can be considered a failure if it does not improve the overall UX of the product. In this case, the new feature cannibalize on another part of the product.
Therefore, the task of the team is to determine at the planning stage how the new function will affect the product as a whole. Will help him grow up or not. The feature / product fit metric is used to assess this.
What is the team’s job?
Often, the development team is engaged in some specific functionality, and it does not set itself the task of improving the UX of the product. Experts want to make sure everyone uses their solution. That is, they don’t focus on the whole product. This approach has a short term effect; it will not be successful in the long term.
A good example of work is product orientation, finding a suitable place for a new feature in an application or service. In other words, defining your feature / product fit.
To do this, the metrics that were discussed earlier are assessed: return and activation to a feature and return, attraction and monetization to the main service. Along with this, they do not forget to determine among which consumers the new functionality will be in demand.
Some innovations deliberately target a small percentage of the general audience. This helps to make the functionality a tool that contributes to the company’s growth and an increase in the overall share of product returns, engagement and monetization.
What should the team avoid while working?
Let’s take a closer look at the mistakes that commands most often make. Avoid them and then you can achieve feature / product fit.
Emailing a review of new functionality to the entire customer base
Everyone is interested in the benefits of using a service, application, tool, etc. It makes no sense to send messages to the entire audience about changes in one function, because the value of such mailing to the end consumer will be zero. As a result, many people can unsubscribe from emails, which negatively affects the return to the main product through this channel.
Use customer base email newsletters to alert you to global changes in the core product that consumers get the most value from.
Tell everyone about the new feature
New functions, as a rule, are aimed at a narrow audience, that is, not all consumers of the product use them. Despite this, some teams often post a large banner in front of everyone with information about the new feature.
This leads to a decrease in the engagement of new users. After all, they are first interested in getting to know the product as a whole. And if you give forehead information about new features that are not useful to all users, you can distract potential customers from the product.
Premature publication of news about a new feature
PR of an innovation immediately after the release of the update will not help find feature / product fit. First, you need to make sure that the new functionality is in the right place in the product and that the audience likes it. Only after that, start spreading information about the update: on the official website, in the application itself, social networks, etc.
Many features will not qualify
Not all functions implemented by the team take root in the product and work for a long time. If a new feature doesn’t match the feature / product fit, remove it without remorse. It will not help the growth of the product, then it makes no sense.
Don’t forget to analyze the old project possibilities. Trends are rapidly changing in the world. What users liked yesterday can be very annoying today. Therefore, large companies regularly check the functionality for compliance with this indicator. If any function ceases to match it, it is removed.
For example, before, on the social network VKontakte, each user had a rating. In the late 00s, users liked to be aware of their popularity and the fact that it was more than anyone else’s.
But over time, the VKontakte audience realized that there was no point in this. When a feature ceased to correspond to feature / product fit, it was removed (this was already in May 2011!).
Until 2016, Pinterest had Like and Save buttons on every card. But many users did not understand the difference between the two, thinking that clicking Like would automatically save the image to their gallery. This led to the dissatisfaction of some of the audience, so the company decided to remove the Like button.
Instagram in the early 00s allowed not only to communicate and exchange photos, but also to organize trips with friends, unite in groups, etc.
The analysis showed that all this functionality is not popular with users. They enjoyed posting photos and tagging specific places better. But not everyone has made it through the jungle of other possibilities. After long discussions and tests, the founders of the company decided to abandon the unpopular features, left the main ones and brought them to meet the feature product / market fit indicator.
In physical products, feature / product fit also takes place. For example, all iPhones used to come with a physical screen unlock button. But in 2017, the company abandoned it, preferring Face ID (unlocking with a face scanner). This decision was aided by the trend of displays with minimal or no bezels. To improve the overall product, Apple dropped the old feature.
How do I find a feature in a product or Feature / Product Fit?
New functionality is rarely rolled out to the entire audience at once (when it comes to large projects). It is tested for a certain period of time on some users in order to collect the necessary information and draw conclusions.
For example, Instagram in April 2019 tested the abandonment of likes. For some users around the world, this feature was not available. More than a year has passed since that moment, and nothing more was said about this initiative. Perhaps the test results did not suit the company and they abandoned the innovation.
Typically, large companies, as part of testing, distribute new features to 1-2% of the total audience. Of course, if your project doesn’t have many regular users, roll out new features to the entire audience. This is the only way to get the information you need to make the right decision.
Developing good functionality that users will enjoy starts with data analysis and user research. And here you need to predict the right time when audience engagement will be at its maximum and bias will be at its minimum.
Instagram acted similarly before the launch of IGTV. One of the problems with the service was short videos. Because of this, “engagement” was lame, and part of the audience preferred YouTube because of their idols who posted long videos there.
This is how IGTV appeared, which today is used to publish long videos (over 60 seconds). That is, initially the company conducted an analysis, found out what the users were missing, and then came up with functionality to close the need. After several tests and achievement of feature / product fit, the feature was “stretched” to all users.
Another good way to find feature / product fit is by talking directly to product users. They leave complaints, recommendations, reviews and requests on social networks, forums, blogs, etc. Analyze this information, you may be able to find cool ideas that will help bring the functionality to perfection.
The Feature / Product Fit checklist
If you are not sure if a new feature will be popular, ask yourself a few questions and give detailed answers to them:
What data is there on the use of this feature?
What do users say about this feature?
How can a core product be used to add value to the new feature?
How can you use notifications to activate this feature?
What incentives can I use to activate a feature?
How can people help activate a feature?
Once you are satisfied with the feature / product fit, ask yourself a few more questions:
What is this retention function? Is it enough?
Which segment of users is reusing the feature?
How to make this functionality available only to them?
What measurable activation strategy for this feature can be applied to these users?
How does this feature affect the return, engagement and monetization of the main product?
If you are just creating a product or have already entered the market, set a goal for yourself to gradually improve it. Without finalizing the functionality, introducing new features, sooner or later you will lose the competition to other companies.
For new and old features, measure feature / product fit. This can be done in much the same way as with product / market fit. We talked about this in detail earlier.
Before rolling out new features to the entire audience, check whether they add value to the product as a whole. If not, abandon the implementation. Use the checklist described above to simplify verification. And if you still have any questions about feature / product fit, write them in the comments, we will be happy to answer.
You can learn more about Feature / Product Fit on our annual course “Profession: Product”
