Less Product, Not More
If your current product isn’t working, adding more features won’t help.
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I love building products. It never feels like work to me, it’s more like a fun hobby I get to do as a job. Luckily, I’m also pretty good at building products so as a profession it has treated me very well.
Unfortunately, I love doing it so much and am so good at it that I tend to do it too much. Give me any problem and I’ll think about how building more product can solve it. Add some features here, update the features over there and all of our strategic problems can be solved. Let’s get started!
Of course, that’s not how things work.
It’s almost never the case that adding more features to your product will solve deeper, underlying problems. Issues like slow growth, poor user engagement and low retention reflect a weak foundation of the entire product and not just a few missing features. Every product has a core value proposition that more features make better, they don’t fix the core.
I’m not alone with having this bias towards product, it’s a common issue in the tech industry. Too often I see teams that are struggling and their solutions are always to build more product! Building is fun, they are good at it, and everything becomes a nail for their hammer.
I’ve worked hard over my career to temper my urges to build new products. I’ve built too many products that failed miserably to believe the next product update will solve all our problems, so I force myself to do the hard work first. When a business is not working, instead of building more product I ask some hard questions:
Who is our customer? Are we sure that the customer really has the problem we’re solving? Is it really urgent for them, or just a nice-to-have?
Do they want a solution? Just because there is a problem doesn’t mean everyone wants a solution. Are we sure this is a problem people want solved?
Are we the best solution? Do they really need a new product or are there other solutions that are easier? Or just good enough?
And the most important question: Where are we wrong? If things are not working, we were wrong about something. Instead of clinging to our beliefs, we have to admit we were wrong and figure out where before we can start to find the truth.
Asking these questions, and finding the answers, is never as fun as building. Often it involves countless customer interviews, market research and exploration. Those are long hours doing hard work and I would much rather be building product.
But, the only thing worse than grinding through all of that hard work is building products no one uses. If the price of making products that people love is walking through glass and being humble enough to question all of our assumptions, that sounds pretty cheap. I would rather struggle and suffer through these difficult questions than ever launch another product that flopped.
It’s not as easy as I’m making it sound. You might ask those hard questions, find answers and rebuild your strategy around them. You might even throw away your old product and build a new one. But, then it turns out you were wrong again and the process repeats. Far more product strategies fail than succeed, and I’ve been in this process countless times.
Even so, it’s what has to be done.
Building is getting easier with AI tools, and as it does it gets even more fun! That makes the siren call of building harder and harder to ignore. We can convince ourselves that it’s so easy to build we should just do it and see what happens. And, while we do, we ignore those huge, rotting cracks in the foundation of the business.
Save yourself years of struggle and ask the hard questions now. Resist the temptation to build, even if it feels great. Focus on making absolutely sure you know what to build and why.
Then, have fun building! You’ve earned it.
For more on Product Strategy, see:
I like the idea that recognizing where you're wrong is an important way for getting to the truth.