Jul 19, 2015
Swiss Army Knife Approach
Editor's Note: “As anyone who has bought a cell phone over the last couple of years can tell you, manufacturers love to cram as many capabilities into a product as possible—cell phones are now also cameras, music players, and game platforms. Why the rush toward "feature bloat"? Because consumers perceive value in this Swiss-Army-Knife approach and will pay for the added utility. The problem comes when the buyer actually starts to use the product. The increased complexity makes for a very unhappy consumer, who will look to return the product or look for another vendor in the future.”
Feature Bloat: The Product Manager's Dilemma
Other pressures on Product Management
Competitive Matrix Market Requirements Business Development Resellers
Outcome: Lack of prioritization Product loaded with features Half baked product Confused sales team Untrained implementation team
Failed implementations and
unhappy customers!
Prioritize, Prioritize and Prioritize Learn to identify the real deal
Get a macroscopic view of all deals Understand the sales cycle in great depth
Understand the deployment issues Work with deployment and support team to get
input on top 3 product issues
Where is the competitor beating you? Identify long lead items
Educate Technical Sales Team Focus on training the sales engineering team Sales Engineering team should know the state of the
product Gain confidence of the technical sales
Expose your prioritization mechanism. Share the internal roadmap
Make them participate in prioritization Financial commitment from customers Let them articulate the customer needs
Exceptions Make exceptions where you need to
Competition Wins! Big Deals Some other exceptions…
Make people aware about the exceptions
Where to start? Organize all the feature requests in one
repository Identify the dimensions for prioritization Communicate the priorities to whole company Publish the roadmap for next 6 months Set expectation that roadmap can change Learn to say “No”.