Why Feature Focus Hurts Your Business

During the decade I've spent leading and coaching software delivery at scale, I've seen patterns that can drive or limit success that directly result from the habits and attitudes of top leaders.

Are your product managers focused on features rather than business results? If so, you are missing out on some very important non-feature characteristics that drive retention, adoption, and expansion. This is especially true in Professional, B2B, and Regulated markets. 

Here are 8 non-feature characteristics (and one bonus) that are critical to retaining and winning customers:

Time to Value

How long does it take from the moment your customer gives you an order until they are able to use your product or service productively? Long installation, customization, validation, and training cycles all delay customers' return on investment, and are real opportunities for innovation. Design systems to minimize startup effort and delay, including time from order to activation or delivery.

Speed to Result

For many products and services, both user satisfaction and overall customer productivity depend on responsiveness and throughput. How long does it take to get a routine result? Are there times when the system is much slower and customers become frustrated? Are you taking advantage of opportunities to improve the worst delays in common use? If not, you likely have frustrated customers who know they can be more productive, potentially with someone else's product. Software that drives on-premise hardware (printers, test instruments) need to include hardware cycle time in this goal.  

Availability and Supportability

Your offering must be available wherever and whenever your customer wants, to maximize their return. From a customer perspective, system outages include both scheduled and unscheduled time, as well as losses of data and defects that block customers from getting work done with your system. 

If your system depends on a third party Auth-as-a-service platform, and your customer cannot authenticate because it is down, that is an availability problem and you need to own it. It’s not your customer’s concern who is responsible, even (especially?) in a supported mixed-vendor configuration.

In production systems with on-premise hardware, it can be a competitive advantage (or table stakes!) to provide continuity of operation even if a Wide Area Network is down. 

How easy is it for your support team to diagnose problems in real time?

For SaaS, your support team must have the tools to diagnose and, mindful of security, work around blocking issues. The best people to help you design those tools? Your support team.

For on-premise software, remote support access proved its worth conclusively during the COVID pandemic. It also has the potential to save you a site visit, resulting in speedier problem resolution at much lower cost.

Cost of Change and other barriers

When your hardware or software changes, do you make it easy for your installed base to move with you? If it's just as much trouble to adopt your new stuff as it is to adopt a competitor, you are begging for a competitive bid process. Retain your existing customers by making it much easier to stay with you than it is to switch. This does not extend to unethical practices like deliberately creating exit barriers, in fact the opposite practice has been shown to be more effective. 

Design your product or service with ease of upgrading in mind. This means backward compatibility, minimizing downtime and effort required to add to or upgrade an existing system, and giving smart cues about what has changed and what has not in order to minimize validation cost and time in production or regulated environments. 

In mixed hardware/software systems (printers, test and diagnostic instruments etc. especially if they are pre-IoT) make sure that adding a new device to existing software does not require a costly and lengthy system upgrade!  Do you have an interface versioning strategy?

Security and Disaster Recovery

Your system is a component of your customer’s IT infrastructure. Are you being a good citizen? In modern systems, that includes encrypting data at rest and in motion, resisting and potentially detecting attacks, robust logging, integrating with federated authentication systems, and being centrally administered. 

Good citizenship means that you actively test, monitor, and review code for known vulnerabilities and respond rapidly (stated objective) to newly discovered exploits. It also includes providing means to backup and restore customer data, and recover in the event of a disaster. If you are offering SaaS, you need to be able to demonstrate those capabilities to auditors and large customers. If on-premise, you may need to integrate with your customer’s security and backup infrastructure.

Handling security and disaster recovery appropriately and responsively will make you stand out from the crowd. If you fail to do so, word will get around.

Regulatory Compliance

Do you or your customers operate in regulated markets like Pharmaceuticals, Medical Devices, Diagnostics, Defense, Food testing, Forensics, or key national infrastructure like Energy? If so, your system likely has responsibilities that it must meet. Failure to pay attention to this has shifted market leadership, and will continue to do so. 

Development teams often view regulation as burdensome and frustrating (it often is) - yet it is the water in which your customers swim. It must be taken seriously and provided for in the product or service. Opportunities for competitive advantage abound here - understanding how to meet those obligations while making life easier and more productive for customers both in normal production and when they are audited.

Perceived Quality

Accurate and timely results, freedom from crashes, a user experience that reflects insight into the job to be done, deep respect for users’ time productivity, ease of integration, administration, and upgrade. Timely fixes for defects when they are discovered. These are a few of the characteristics that are part of our idea of  “quality” when it comes to software. It takes attention and effort to meet these expectations, Who is responsible?

Architecture and Technical Debt 

Investing in architecture and technical debt retirement are the ante for adaptability at reasonable cost. If you are so focused on satisfying tactical feature requests that you fail to keep your systems modern, you will face crises of obsolescence and brittleness, and may even have difficulty hiring people who can work on your ancient code. 

Bonus: Predictability / Doing as you say

I admit that this is not something that Product Managers alone can address. This is a deep organizational capability that starts with commitment from the top, and carries through to being selective and making only those promises you can keep. If you do it well, you can develop a competitive advantage in a crowded field. Most teams are not good at being predictable. Those that are, develop credibility with customers. In my experience trust and predictability are real and underappreciated competitive advantages. 

These characteristics are necessary to market success, and do not occur by accident. They need attention and investment. If your Product Marketing team is responsible only for delivering features, who is responsible for delivering growth and retention? If you can name someone, but they don’t control a slice of development capacity, you are probably kidding yourself. 

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