How to Be Sure the Software Features You Are Building Are the Right Ones

Do Stop Lights Automatically Improve Traffic?

We've all seen it; a growing city where traffic issues start to become unbearable, a big problem for a lot of people. And wherever we see big problems for lots of people, we eventually see someone attempt to solve it.

And then it happens. You go away for a business trip, and when you return, there is a new traffic light at the congested intersection. At first, you don't like the change, but you tell yourself, "Maybe this will improve the traffic problem; maybe this is what we need."

But a week goes by, and you realize that traffic isn't any better. In fact, it is now taking you longer to get to work, and that intersection causes you more delays than ever. The traffic light made things worse, not better.

Why? Probably because it was installed in the wrong place, configured poorly, or programmed in a way that hurts traffic flow.

How can this happen? It was the needed and obvious solution, right?

What went wrong was that there was not enough focus on studying the problem prior to implementing a possible solution. What if the people trying to solve the problem had done the following?

• Gathered enough data by conducting a thorough traffic behavior and pattern analysis
• Researched deeply to learn what solutions had worked in similar situations in other places
• Enlisted support from traffic management experts to choose the best options for a solution
• Tested best solution options
• Garnered feedback from the local drivers and continued to monitor traffic to evaluate the effectiveness
• Configured and tuned all traffic signals to optimize flow
• Periodically evaluated changes in traffic patterns and adjust programming accordingly

Software Features Are Like Stop Lights

What's more fun than the day when your smartphone or laptop operating system updates and a new feature actually makes your user experience worse? I don’t know about you, but when an application I rely upon adds a feature that adds friction to my experience, I find it quite disappointing. I am left asking myself, “Am I the only customer who hates this new feature? Why didn't they add the features that I have been wishing and waiting for?”

Then a competing application comes along with all the features I want, and I am quick to switch.

Think Evernote → Notion, Skype → Zoom, and the list goes on and on. I am sure you have your own list.

Just like the traffic commission, the people in charge of software products are quite prone to installing stop lights (new features) intended to improve driver experience, only to find that they missed the mark and just created more frustration. Eventually, the drivers move to another town.

Keep the Citizens Happy

So how can we—product owners or founders of tech companies—avoid this pattern of mistakes and keep our customers thrilled to be here?

It's pretty obvious by now, right?

It all comes down to making sure that our development decisions are informed using a constant flow of user data: both feedback-driven and behavioral analytics. And once we have this data flowing, we must have someone assessing and ranking which problems to address first and which features best solve them. This person needs to be someone who gets the vision of the company, someone who deeply understands the customers.

Full-Time Product Owner

One of the more consistent challenges we have observed in working with early-stage growing tech companies is the need for a full-time product owner.

Often the founders are great at hearing about customer pains and imagining features to solve them, but this usually breaks down in two main areas: how these features are prioritized, and the daily back-and-forth support of the development team as they attempt to build the feature the way the founder imagined it.

For example, I can remember one client whose founder was intelligent, engaged, and energetic. He was great at understanding a problem and imagining a feature to solve it. The issue was, he was usually where he SHOULD be: out in the field building partnerships and focusing on growing the company.

Because of this, he couldn’t spend much time analyzing which problems would be the lowest hanging fruit to solve, with the highest cost-benefit payoff for the customer. And he wasn't so available to guide the development team with constant feedback on whether they were creating the solution he had imagined in a way that he felt customers would love.

Customer Feedback & Feature Prioritization Systems

Going back to the mistakes that led to the poorly placed and poorly programmed stoplight, if we want to be making consistently great product feature prioritization decisions, product owners need to have access to customer behavior data and customer feedback. Ideally, these systems should be automated and constantly improving so that the more customers you have, the more your team is understanding how they are engaging with and enjoying your product (and where there is friction). As we have evaluated the successes and failures of our partners over the years, we started realizing that this information was often not reliably flowing to them because there were no systems in place, and if there were, they were quite manual.

We asked ourselves how we could better support our clients to ensure their product development was high-performing. We realized that we could bring more value by bringing systems, suggestions, and best practices to make it easier for our clients to get these systems in place.

We also realized that we had learned a lot about product feature prioritization methodologies that we could share with our clients. Since we can't start making great decisions with the data until we have consistent and effective methods for evaluating it.

High-Performance Product Evolution

In order to ensure that your product development is high-performing, it is critical that your product feature roadmap is directionally correct at all times. You need to have the right team building the right product, and they need to be using highly effective processes of collaboration, product management, and project management.

If you are building a software product that is core to the value you create for your customers, we invite you to take 5 minutes to evaluate how you feel you are doing currently. This Product Development Efficiency Scorecard will help you see the areas where you are doing well and perhaps some of the areas where you want to focus your attention in the near future.

Creating a software product customers love requires a commitment to constant evaluation and improvement of the processes used. We hope this is helpful to you as you take your development to the next level because it is a great feeling to know that you have a high-performing team and a product that is evolving steadily in the right direction.