Controlling Feature Bloatpresented by Rishi Bhargava

Swiss Army Knife Approach

Editor's Note: “As anyone who has bought a cell phone over the last couple of years can tell you, manufacturers love to cram as many capabilities into a product as possible—cell phones are now also cameras, music players, and game platforms. Why the rush toward "feature bloat"? Because consumers perceive value in this Swiss-Army-Knife approach and will pay for the added utility. The problem comes when the buyer actually starts to use the product. The increased complexity makes for a very unhappy consumer, who will look to return the product or look for another vendor in the future.”

Feature Bloat: The Product Manager's Dilemma

Demands on Product Management

Implementation & SupportSales

CustomersEngineering

Product Management

Other pressures on Product Management

Competitive Matrix Market Requirements Business Development Resellers

Outcome: Lack of prioritization Product loaded with features Half baked product Confused sales team Untrained implementation team

Failed implementations and

unhappy customers!

Find your Way Out

Prioritize, Prioritize and Prioritize Learn to identify the real deal

Get a macroscopic view of all deals Understand the sales cycle in great depth

Understand the deployment issues Work with deployment and support team to get

input on top 3 product issues

Where is the competitor beating you? Identify long lead items

Educate Technical Sales Team Focus on training the sales engineering team Sales Engineering team should know the state of the

product Gain confidence of the technical sales

Expose your prioritization mechanism. Share the internal roadmap

Make them participate in prioritization Financial commitment from customers Let them articulate the customer needs

Exceptions Make exceptions where you need to

Competition Wins! Big Deals Some other exceptions…

Make people aware about the exceptions

Where to start? Organize all the feature requests in one

repository Identify the dimensions for prioritization Communicate the priorities to whole company Publish the roadmap for next 6 months Set expectation that roadmap can change Learn to say “No”.