Comments on: Power Post #2: Hoarding Features & Products

By: Miker

Miker — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:20:32 +0000

My experience is that taking away a feature is just as much work internally as adding a feature. It’s usually much more rewarding to add functionality to a product because that usually better solves customer problems. At some point in the maturity of the product, however, the most important story is to prune rather than to add. And then sell that change as usability.

By: Things I Read This Week | Brent Ozar - Too Much Information

Things I Read This Week | Brent Ozar - Too Much Information — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:16:03 +0000

[...] The Cranky PM exposes bloatware – yep, working at Quest, it’s pretty much like this too. “We can’t get rid of that feature! Someone, somewhere might be using it!” This is how we end up with Toad’s infamous options screen that actually has a search box because there’s so many options: [...]

By: Jeffrey

Jeffrey — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:57:53 +0000

Ha! One true measure of a good PM is that ability to kill (er… EOL) a product that is no longer profitable. Good question to ask when interviewing prospective PMs – “Have you ever EOL’d a product? If so, how did you do it?”

By: Pedro

Pedro — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:57:32 +0000

Don, I tried your approach and it was not as successful as I expected. Our products are well instrumented, and nearly all our partners are compliant in regularly feeding the data to us.

What I discovered, however, is that:
1. If you have millions of users, some idiot uses every feature and every platform. There’s no (cheap) way to prove that the 0.2% of users used a particular feature by mistake rather than on purpose. And which executive is willing to piss off the one big client where 5% of users are still on IE 6?
2. I have to admit (because it is demonstrated clearly by the win/loss reports) that a few features get very little use in the field but are still very important in the sales process; buyers apparently think they might really need those features someday. But once I acknowledge this for a few features, it is hard to use the product usage data to prove that any feature can be done away with.

By: ME

ME — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:50:11 +0000

Great post. Timely for those of us who are still fighting, but growing weary of our campaign to FINALLY stop supporting IE6 (the pile of crap it is and always has been)… I once read that the true mark of a mature product manager is that they take stuff OUT of the product.
I think you hit the nail right on the head – there is this hand-wringing paranoia about “OH what if someone uses it and we turn it off?” Even though we all know that anyone old enough to have a compatible OS for it moved to Florida at least 5 years ago.

By: Don MacLennan

Don MacLennan — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 04:55:08 +0000

ok, so this one is solveable. You’ve gotta find a way to instrument data collection about your product’s usage by customers. In a SaaS environment, a relative layup: run reports on stuff like web server & app server logs and databases and anything else you can get your hands on. For customer premise deployments: pre-package reports that describe customer usage patterns and get customers to email the reports to you. Better yet, use some sort of “phone home” connection to do the same. You’ll get all sorts of wonderful by-products: user personas will emerge, performance test scenarios will emerge, etc.

Is convincing engineers to add instrumentation code hard? Can be. Getting customers to give you the data? Sure. But without this fact base, as my colleague noted, you’re arguing with someone else’s hypothesis, and they don’t have any data to base it on. Cause you don’t either.

By: Gururaj s Rao

Gururaj s Rao — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:41:16 +0000

Cranky PM – Hoarding Features & Products http://bit.ly/939O2s – no one sees a product/feature till it is removed :) #pm

By: Travis Jensen

Travis Jensen — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:23:49 +0000

Power Post #2: Hoarding Features & Products: Shared by Travis

What a great analogy for why it is important for … http://bit.ly/6Kuk9l

By: Hawley Bowen

Hawley Bowen — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:42:40 +0000

The Cranky Product Manager – Power Post #2: Hoarding Features & Products http://bit.ly/5UTcQl

By: Doug Schaefer

Doug Schaefer — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:03:06 +0000

RT @enwafor: RT @crankypm New cranky post! Power Post #2: Hoarding Features & Products – http://tinyurl.com/yb7gto6 >> bang on!