The Big Feature Gamble
A lot of product and development teams have a gambling problem.
They make bets all the time on delivering a feature and when that bet doesn’t pay off, either because they fail to ship in a reasonable time or the customers didn’t like / couldn’t use it, they continue to sink money in by committing more time to try to complete the feature, or by allowing the feature to hang around in the product creating UX and support debt.
Smart gamblers know how much they can afford lose. They place their bet and if it doesn’t come off in the way they’d hoped they cut their losses and walk away.
Every time you commit to building something you are betting (investing) time and resource into building that thing. That’s time and resource that could have gone into something else if what you built turns out to be a dud. Failed features also bloat the product and get in they. They can cost the business down stream as well by causing problems for sales or support.
As a rule of thumb up to 50% of the features a team releases won’t have the impact they intended. So the aim is to test if an idea will deliver value as cheaply and quickly as possible so you don’t waste valuable time and resource.
Next time you go to place a product bet, make sure you limit your risk by:
Clearly understanding the problem you are trying to solve for
Understanding how you will measure progress and what constitutes a ‘win’
Constantly check the value:effort ratio to make sure you’re not heading into a time sink
Understanding what is the smallest bet you can make to test your hypothesis (can you do this without committing development time?)
Know what your walk away point is (for example; “if we can’t ship this feature within 2 weeks, we’ll stop and re-assess, and potentially walk away completely”)
Successful product teams win by innovating quickly and regularly pushing value to their customers. This is a whole team mindset that requires practice and commitment from everybody.
By stepping though the five points above when embarking on a new feature implementation you can limit your risk, protect your product and deliver a better outcome for your customers.
