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According to a report from Pendo, 80% of product features rarely or never get used. You can scale your dev team from two to 10 and build all the bells and whistles you can possibly imagine. But, in the end, the vast majority of your users will only ever use the core features of your product.
Here’s why that’s a problem.
The report revealed that publicly-traded cloud software companies collectively invest up to $29.5 billion developing those features every year. That’s enough to buy the Yankees, Dodgers, and Red Sox, with change!
But let’s put that in slightly more relatable terms. The average salary for a US developer is around $100,000, so you’re looking at $1 million/year for a team of 10 developers. Now, if only 20% of that resource is working on valuable features that actually get used, you’re effectively throwing $800,000 down the drain. Every. Single. Year.
To dig into where things are going wrong for product teams, I hosted a webinar with Daniel Andor, the Founder and Product Strategist at Durran. He’s been in the field for 12 years and is an expert at eliminating user friction for product teams.
Together, we discussed the three key steps for eliminating user friction and boosting product usage:
Let’s dive in — or you can catch a two-minute highlight reel of the webinar here →
The first step towards feature usage euphoria is working out why users aren’t using your features right now. And for that, you need to put your product development process under the microscope.
Where is your process going wrong — and how can you stop building features with poor adoption and usage? Let’s look at some of the top causes below.
Every product manager and designer touts the importance of listening to their customers. You write user stories, you think about what the user wants, maybe you even develop features based on direct requests from customers.
But, chances are, you aren’t quite as close to your customers as you think you are. Here are four things you can start doing to get closer to your customers:
You could even create a Slack group of users who are up for testing and collaborating on new features. Just be careful not to let them skew your decisions — more on that below!
It doesn’t matter if you have 100 customers or 100,000. Chances are, some of them will be more willing to talk to you than others.
When discussing one of his previous roles, Daniel Andor says, “We thought that a bunch of customers were asking for a feature or improvement, but there were actually just a few of them, but very loud customers. So they sent over the same thing a bunch of times. And we thought, oh look, everybody’s asking for this thing, but it was actually not like that.”
The risk here is obvious. To get around it, try and link all your feature requests to a specific email address or user account. That way, you can quickly identify users who are spamming you. And you can avoid wasting huge amounts of resources on a feature that only they care about.
Successful product development starts and ends with your users. And yet, for one reason or another, the marketability of your product can take over. Sometimes, you just want something cool to shout about in your ads.
Here are two quick examples:
Of course, it’s OK to take inspiration from different places and shout about an exciting feature in your ads. But your users need to want it first.
Source: Unsplash
We’ve already talked about ways you can fix your processes to stop shipping features with poor adoption. But what about the ones that are already out there?
To identify friction points, Andor suggests creating a customer map to visualize a user’s journey through your product. This is especially important if you offer a free trial or freemium model, as it’ll give you a clear overview of which features keep people around until they convert.
Here are a few tools that can help you out:
This is a great time to loop in your sales and customer success teams too. If they share any grumbles from customers about specific features or friction points, add them to your user journey map to give it a little more life.
Once you’ve sorted out your processes and fixed the friction points with your existing features, it’s time to start thinking about verifying new feature ideas.
“The difference between a good product team and a bad product team is how many assumptions they can test — the speed of testing assumptions and throwing out what’s not working.” — Daniel Andor, Founder and Product Strategist at Durran
Andor says he was listening to PRODUCTEA with Leah recently and she was talking about her efforts to track the accuracy of her assumptions. She found that 70–80% of them were wrong.
“So come on, it’s somebody that’s highly skilled, she knows her stuff, and still, 80% of the time you’re wrong and you have 20% that’s OK. And, from that 20%, probably like 5% or 10% that are high-value stuff.”
Now, of course, it’s better for 80% of your assumptions to be wrong than 80% of your features to go unused. So take the time to test your assumptions and avoid jumping to conclusions. One approach that can help you here is Mixed Methods Research, which is all about combining data sources and research techniques to make superior product decisions.
When it comes to testing assumptions, Andor says it’s important to leave your egos at the door. “One of the things when I started to hire designers in one of the teams, it was the first thing on the list when they joined the team. No egos and you have to be coachable.”
Product teams waste a huge amount of time, money, blood, sweat, and tears on features that rarely or never get used. To boost effectiveness, you need to refresh the processes that define which features you work on, identify and resolve friction points with your existing features, and verify assumptions before developing new ones.
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