In the tech world, there are some people who believe that product features are critical and others who believe less is more. The former believe that software products will be outdone by competitors if new features aren't continuously added. Hence, why many vendors are rushing to add AI to their products right now. The latter believe that software products are bloated and that having tons of features doesn't help adoption and, in fact, can actually hurt it. After all, there are many examples of software products in which users only utilize a small fraction of the product features. Microsoft Excel is a good example of this since most users only use a small percent of what is available to them.
I believe a bit of both here. I am a huge fan of removing product features that aren't widely used, especially if it makes the overall product experience better. I have worked with a lot of software products that are super difficult to learn because the 5-10 key features you need are buried amongst the 50 that you rarely use. But I do think there are times when software products do make the difference between a product being successful and not successful. To illustrate this, I will use a real-life example with a product called Gong.
Gong is a sales tool that helps organizations sell better by recording sales calls, analyzing them, and providing mentoring opportunities. A while back, I described the product and my feature wishlist for Gong in this blog post. Recently, my organization stopped using Gong in favor of a competing product. It was only after I used this different product that I realized how much some of the features I had grown accustomed to in Gong helped me perform my job. Here are just a few examples:
I believe a bit of both here. I am a huge fan of removing product features that aren't widely used, especially if it makes the overall product experience better. I have worked with a lot of software products that are super difficult to learn because the 5-10 key features you need are buried amongst the 50 that you rarely use. But I do think there are times when software products do make the difference between a product being successful and not successful. To illustrate this, I will use a real-life example with a product called Gong.
Gong is a sales tool that helps organizations sell better by recording sales calls, analyzing them, and providing mentoring opportunities. A while back, I described the product and my feature wishlist for Gong in this blog post. Recently, my organization stopped using Gong in favor of a competing product. It was only after I used this different product that I realized how much some of the features I had grown accustomed to in Gong helped me perform my job. Here are just a few examples:
- In Gong, it was easy for me to be notified when certain accounts, people, or competitors were mentioned in sales calls I couldn't attend. This feature made it easy to get a list of calls and go right to the locations where the key phrases were mentioned. The new tool makes this much more difficult.
- In Gong, the alerts I configured for the phrases above would be timestamped so as I got notifications, they would only be for new calls I hadn't seen. The new tool sends alerts, but clicking on alerts shows all calls, not just new ones.
- In Gong I could easily mention a co-worker at a spot in the call and provide mentoring and advice. This would trigger an alert notification to them and start a threaded discussion where we could engage. The new tool we are using doesn't provide this functionality
- In Gong, it was easy to select specific portions of a call and share it with colleagues. This was done in a way that is similar to Apple's GarageBand where you drag a starting and ending point. The new tool can share portions, but it is not a great user experience.
- In Gong, it was possible to just listen to a specific person in a call by selecting them and having Gong skip all other portions. In the new tool, you have to manually click all over the call to do the same thing.
There are many other differences, but the point is that my usage of this particular "job to be done" has decreased by about 75% because of how difficult it is in the new product. All of these feature deficiencies add up to lower product adoption. I have explained these to our new vendor and I am sure they will eventually add them, but for now, these missing features make it almost impossible to do what I want to do.
While the specific example used here (sales software) isn't important, what this illustrates is the real impact of useful software product features. While it is easy to say that features don't matter, when a product has a bad UI or is missing features, adoption suffers. I believe that I am less able to help my employer improve today because of this technology change. Sometimes features matter...