Choosing the right features to build is one of the most important things we do as founders. But it’s also really hard.
Steve is currently co-writing a book on this topic. For research, he’s been talking to bootstrapped, stable, well-run, mature, profitable software companies of about 20-50 people, asking them how they go about feature prioritisation – how they did this in the early days, how that changed over time, and what they do now.
Steve shares 5 unique and interesting approaches he’s discovered so far.
Slides
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Transcript
Steve McLeod
I want to tell you about a project I’m working on called Kill the HIPPO. That’s HIPPO, the acronym for Highest Paid Person’s Opinion, it has nothing to do with the large water dwelling mammal. This project is taking the form of a book. Well, it will be a book when it’s finished, hopefully, maybe by the end of this year. And in this book, I’m collecting stories of how small bootstrap software teams go about choosing what feature to build next in their product.
Yes, there is a ton of stuff already written about this, but I believe that what exists is highly biased towards teams and large organizations, and often with VC funding, whereas a lot of software is created by small bootstrap teams, and they are operating under a completely different set of constraints. Basically, they have less of everything, less data, less time, less resources, less people, and yet they still need to make these critical decisions.
The companies I’ve been talking to to collect these stories are, yes, bootstrapped, but they’re also stable, well, run, mature, profitable, and with about 20 to 50 employees, although sometimes it’s outside of that range, I’ve been asking them how they chose what to build in the early days, how that changed over time, and what they do today. And I have to tell you, these stories, at least for me, have been illuminating.
I’ve been hearing many common themes, such as, we built too many features in the early days. We should have said no more often, about the importance of having a strong vision, about the importance of sticking to that strong vision, and about ongoing battles with technical debt. But I’ve also been hearing some unique approaches that teams have adopted to tackle this problem, and I want to spend the rest of my time now sharing with you five of those unique approaches.
James Kennedy, from procurement Express, has learned to use Wow as a factor in deciding what to build. James has more than 100 competitors, all with pretty much the same software and the same features, and it’s really hard to stand out. What James has started doing when choosing what to build next is he looks at his list of highly requested ideas, and he picks one that he thinks his product team can build in such a way that it will spark, Wow. What that means is that when James is on a call with a potential customer, or even with an existing customer, he wants to hear them say, Wow, this is going to make my job easier. Wow, I didn’t realize procurement software could do that. Wow, this is going to save me a lot of time.
James records these calls. And on a regular schedule, plays snippets of them back to his entire product team so the whole product team can experience how their work is sparking Wow. Bridget Harris, who’s getting mentioned a lot today, told me this fascinating story from the early days of Youcanbookme how they built at least partly, both for and with Simon from Canada. Simon was a massage therapist, not a Mountie. He was an early customer, and he’s a real person. Simon was both friendly and generous with his time, and was willing to get on frequent calls with Keith, Bridget’s co founder. Two talk about what features they were thinking of building next, and Simon would help work out whether it’s actually a feature that would help him do his job, but also how the small details might work.
I really like this story for a couple of reasons. One, I realized they did the same thing in my own company, but didn’t realize until Bridget told me the story. And second, in those early days, there’s so much uncertainty, there’s not enough time, there’s so much to do. And if you can find your own Simon from Canada, you’re dramatically increasing the probability that you’re actually going to build a product that people want to use.
Our friends at Balsamiq, Peldi and Liz Green told me about this seasons approach, or maybe it’s a Meta approach. My product, and probably your product, too, has a backlog so long we couldn’t get through it if we did nothing but work on it for 10 years. And the problem here is the entire classes of backlog item get completely buried. So Balsamiq’s approach to try and deal with this is to designate that the next six months, or maybe 12 months, is the season for something, and that’s all they do. It might be the season for bug fixes. They just do bug fixes. Or the season for dropping features. It might be the season for a design refresh, or, yes, even the season for adding small quantity of life improvements. And the beauty of this is each backlog item, no matter what its class or type, at least, gets a chance to be considered from time to time.
Tyler King, from Lesson Nine CRM, has learned to think of features that he’s thinking of building as either cup holder features or CarPlay features. If you’ve tried to buy a car or even rent a car in the last few years, there’s a good chance that CarPlay, or the Android equivalent, was high on your list of must have features, and yet CarPlay didn’t even exist as a thing not so long ago. Tyler believes he made a critical mistake, because for several years, he was only listening to what his existing customers were asking for, and they tend to ask for small, iterative improvements, the equivalent of more cup holders or better cup holders. Meanwhile, the competitive landscape changed. His major competitors had introduced these new innovations, and he hadn’t realized this was happening. He had fallen behind, and there was a lot of cash. Lot of catch up to be doing. Tyler has now learned that he must balance the work on cup holders to keep the existing customers happy with the work on these major new car play style must have features for potential new buyers.
Anthony Eden from DNSimple just reflective guy and thinks deeply about how he runs his company, including this problem of what to build next. Anthony created his own framework, comprehensive, well documented involved having multiple backlogs and getting input from key stakeholders and putting it all into a really complicated, weighted formula. It wasn’t quite that complicated, and that would tell them what to build next. It was one problem. It wasn’t actually working. They were unable to deliver features with any type of velocity. Now, Anthony was wise enough to realize he wasn’t alone with this problem. He looked around a couple of years ago and settled on Ryan Singer’s Shape Up framework and tried it for a few months, but there were a couple of things about it that weren’t right for his team’s culture. Instead of throwing it out, he made a couple of tweaks and adapted it so it would work with his team, and the results have been phenomenal.
Wrapping up, I have two requests for you. First, if you’re running a small bootstrap software company and it sounds like the one I described a few slides ago, I want to hear your story, please get in touch so we can arrange the time for that to happen. Second, if you want to hear more of these stories in more detail as they’re available, go to killthehippo.com put in your email address, and I’ll let you know when there’s more to read. Thank you.
Steve McLeod
Founder & CEO, Feature Upvote
Feature Upvote, is a SaaS for collecting and centralising customer feedback that’s become unexpectedly popular in the video games industry. It’s Steve’s third software business.
The first business was a complete flop, only ever selling one license. Financial salvation came when the business morphed into a successful consultancy.
The second business was an old-school try-before-you-buy shareware-style desktop app, acquired after 10+ years.
After experiencing near burn-out with his first business, Steve is firmly in the “lifestyle business” camp. He intentionally aims to keep his business low-stress, aiming only for modest, manageable growth, so that he can keep mentally healthy while running it.
Originally from New Zealand, Steve now lives in Barcelona, Spain.
