Functionality first, features second
Meet Joe, he is not an ordinary Joe living next door. He is a technology product manager building the next big thing. He followed every lean development technique and launched his MVP amid much fanfare.
Using insights and data from the MVP, Joe and his engineering team start building their next version of the product.
But their planned launch date gets advanced many times as not everything in life goes according to the plan.
After many sprints, he is still struggling to build his product and the launch date is now changed umpteen times.
Joe is not alone as this is one of the most common reasons behind the failure and delayed launch of many technology start-ups.
The reason, my friends, is that he focused too much on building features. Now, you may wonder, what’s the point in building a product without features.
Let’s take a deep breath and think from the customer’s point of view. They don’t need too many features as long as your product has the required functionality.
It is common to confuse features with functionality as they appear the same. But they aren’t, let’s go by definition first
Feature: a distinctive attribute or aspect of something.
Functionality: the quality of being suited to serve a purpose well; practicality.
Did you notice the difference? Features focus on distinctive attributes and it is not a bad idea to build some differentiators. However, customers don’t care as long as their purpose is solved, at least in the beginning.
Just like Joe most of the product companies get stuck in the endless feature delivery loop as they become obsessed with building features. However, they tend to forget that there is no end to it.
This is the reason, the Jobs-to-be-done framework is quite handy as it highlights the fact that customers buy a solution for their problems. They don’t necessarily need galore of features.
If we focus too much on features, we limit our ability to solve customer problems in a much more effective way.
One good example from JTBD is that people want to keep their garden beautiful at all times with nicely cut grass. So, maybe they just need a lightweight foldable lawnmower than an advanced machine with too many blades and a complex toolkit.
So, my advice to Joe is that, build functionalities first and then try to load each one of them with features, one by one.
Joe can plan his product releases based on core functionalities without too many add-on’s.
Once basics KPIs are met in terms of acquisition and market penetration, Joe can work with customers to build features as he can get instant feedback and pivot as and when needed.
In the next article, we will dig deeper into the Functionality first methodology and its key benefits. Stay tuned.
Note: This article covers mainly the B2C world and direct application in the Enterprise world is subjective.
