Feature creep, the gradual expansion of a product’s features beyond its core, is likely motivated by a team’s excitement about their own ability to innovate and make a product that’s better than anything that already exists. However, it’s unlikely that any of these additional non-core features will provide the substantial increase in value (10x, as reported in the reading) required for customers to adopt a new solution. In reality, the tool and interface will get bogged down with complicated, uninterpretable details that make it harder to learn and more intimidating to use. As soon as a customer gets the sense that a new product to replace an existing solution is hard to use, their aversion to the new will kick in and they won’t adopt the new product.
In this situation, a product manager has to advocate on behalf of a potential adopter of the new product, specifically emphasizing how the added features would not be beneficial and would make the tool seem less accessible. They could emphasize that it doesn’t matter how exciting, innovative, or easy to use each of the features are after they get familiar with them: people’s first impression of the tool will always dictate how many users you are able to actually get to use your product. If reminded that they will be able to better sell to stony buyers if they instead focus on refining and perfecting the core features of the product, an eager seller’s perspective can be more aligned with that of the stony buyer which will increase their chances of fulfilling their desire to sell the product.
This becomes a tricky balance when considering how to facilitate the adoption of new features when buyers are strongly influenced by their loss aversion. How can you get buyers to give up what they already have to adopt something new? They have to be comfortable enough with the new product that they don’t feel they’re giving up too much, but if the new product is just more of the same, there’s no reason for them to switch. So the new product has to be better without being too different. The new features that function as the deciding factor convincing the users to switch have to be both unobtrusive enough that they don’t disrupt the flow that the user is familiar with and substantial enough that the user is convinced to move over.
Combining all of these lessons together, new features must be core to the product’s functionality, must not disrupt the flow that the user is familiar with, and must substantially improve the user’s experience or their outcome. It’s quite the needle to thread, but if you are able to achieve all of those goals, you might have a very successful product on your hands.
