Probably the worst feeling as a Product Manager is to put a new release of a product out onto the market only to find out that half of the features that you thought were really important for the release are entirely unnecessary, or otherwise panned by analysts and market critics as being orthogonal to the core strengths of the product. A product with hundreds of unused features is more or less the equivalent to someone taking a perfectly good sweater and going too far with a bedazzler. Sure, to the person (or people) that made the sweater, it’s a thing of art. But for the person who ultimately has to look at it, or, even worse, physically use it, it’s a completely miserable experience that may ultimately lead to one wanting to dig their eyes out with a fork.

So what are some of the ways to prevent feature-sprawl? Here are a few tips that I’ve found generally useful as methods to hedge against excessive feature expansions.

#1: Develop Real User Personas

All too often it’s tempting to over-generalize and over-simplify the persona of the users you expect to use your product.  Having a vague or inaccurate portrait of who your target user is will make it difficult to properly write use cases, which in turn can lead to missing features in the product, or worse, excessive features that overlap or contradict each other.  Nothing is more confusing or frustrating for a user than finding out there are several different ways to perform the same operation.

#2: Write Complete Use Cases

I can’t even remember the number of times I have seen Product Managers make this mistake: they begin writing new requirements for a product before they’ve even considered how the product will be used.  Sometimes a product will make its way entirely through development without a real use case ever being written.  Sometimes, if the product is simple enough or just by luck, the product without clear use cases will end up actually being usable.  But usually this is not the case, and the root cause can be traced back to a lack of understanding from the QA and Development teams understanding just how the product was supposed to be used.

In order for everyone on the development team to make the right choices, they must fully understand who is  using the product and how they will interact with it.

#3: Tie Features to Themes

All features should go towards a given theme for a release.  When a feature can’t be tied back to an overall theme for a given release, it’s much more difficult to justify its inclusion in the product.  Having themes can also help to guarantee that engineering time is spent in the areas of the product that are most critical to the release overall.

#4: Prune Unused Features Regularly

Pruning features from software, as with pruning branches from trees, can spur new growth and keep things organized and healthy.  If customer feedback clearly indicates that a particular aspect or feature of the product is confusing, frustrating, buggy, or unused, don’t be afraid to schedule it for removal upon the next major release of the product.  Regularly communicating with your customers that features will be dropped, and being sure to deprecate a feature before removing it will keep your customers happy.

#5: Visual Prototype Early and Often

Visual prototyping is an absolutely essential part of building a solid product, and it’s all too often skipped over during the initial design and planning phases.  Visually prototyping features early can help determine the utility of new features and functionality, even before complete product requirements are developed.  It can also help illuminate new ideas that may have not initially been considered.  Visual prototypes should be revisited frequently throughout the release cycle as the product develops to insure that the user interaction is consistent and straightforward.  And be sure keep in mind: even the most low-tech method of visually prototyping a feature — using pen and paper — can provide a tremendous amount of insight very early on in the release.

Got any other tips or suggestions?  Let me know!

Filed under: Product Management