Don’t compete on features | Hacker News Reader

Don’t compete on features

andrewchenblog.com

76 pointsrevorad18 comments

BMW is not a good example. It might be an illutrative marketing and positioning example, but as an owner of one these ultimate driving machines I can certainly say - never again. They set the plank very high and failed to deliver. From firmware that was antiquated on a delivery to spending few days in service every few weeks - that's just not one typically expects from a brand new 100K car.

In other words - if you are not competing on features, make sure you deliver on those ambiguous marketing messages you use instead. Because the less precise you are the more your customers will assume and the greater their disappointent will be.

Did you really expect a $100K plus car to be as reliable as a honda? I mean, my expectation of any highly complex low-volume product is that I'm going to hit a lot more bugs than with a similar high volume product, no matter how much care was put in by the manufacturer.

But actually, I think BMW is an illustrative example. They spend dramatically more on advertising per-unit sold than Honda does, they have a dramatically worse reputation for reliability than Honda, and yet I believe they maintain a higher profit margin on a much lower volume vs. Honda.

Honda, here, has the "feature" of reliability; this is a big thing for nearly everyone, and it takes a /lot/ of marketing dollars to make people choose to pay more for a product that lacks that particular feature.

So yeah, if you can get rich people to pay extra for nothing more than good marketing, hey, more power to you. But, without continual and consistent marketing outlays, someone else will come along with a better, cheaper product, and unless you can outspend them, Honda will eat your lunch.

There's an old adage I've heard, with various high-end cars inserted as appropriate...

"You really need to buy two BMWs, one for the road and one for the shop". (replace BMW with Jaguar, Ferrari, etc.)

Two other minor recommendations I give all of my friends looking to buy a new car:

read Consumer Reports long term reliability rating (or similarly http://www.truedelta.com/) and find your car there. If reliability is an important factor in your purchase, these are the resources to go for your answers.

For safety try sites like http://www.iihs.org/ratings/ and http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/safety-recalls/carcr... for videos.

...unless features are what you're competing on.

Usually this is the correct advice, but there are markets out there of people who need to take the next step up from a basic product and features are exactly what they're looking for.

Take Basecamp for example. There was recently an article on HN from someone who clearly outgrew the product. The consensus on HN was "this guy isn't in Basecamp's target market", and that's absolutely true.

But that also means he IS in a market of people looking for something like Basecamp but with more features. Something in between Basecamp and, say, MS Project. For these markets, competing on features may work.

Just don't go overboard, or you'll end up remaking MS Project :)

(I am the original author of the blog post)

Disagree. What does it meant to have Basecamp with "more features"? Features aren't in themselves good things.

Instead, you end up needing to focus the new features around a particular theme or value proposition- be it better collaboration, or better security, or whatever.

And then while you're adding features in that direction, oftentimes you don't need to implement the full Basecamp featureset. You just need to be better in a direction that's valuable and enough of the base featureset to have an OK product. Seriously, it's not a good idea to start up a new product and expect to build all of Basecamp AND add new features and be successful. That'd take years to even get the first version of the product out. Avoid unless you have millions in funding and an excellent team from the get-go that knows exactly how to execute this strategy.

This basically nonsense, at least for some markets. Customers for our enterprise health information exchange products absolutely do rate us against our competitors on features. Customers have evaluation committees go through and rate us on long lists of features, and knock off points if the competitor has something we don't. There are other factors in the purchasing decision but it's just naive to think that you don't have to compete on features. (And no, we can't sell a simpler product to individual consumers. No point in that.)

I think you need to be careful not to assume that all customers are enterprises with committees.

In fact, I'd argue that it's dangerous for a non-enterprise entity to target enterprise customers at all; you may as well try to sell your English novel to the Chinese.

A lot of people a lot smarter than me have written extensively on this, but none better than Joel.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

Makes sense to me. I remember a wonderful article in HBR (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/04/make_your_competition_irrele...) that made a similar point.

I think the one main point is: if you compete on features (and please don't argue semantics), even if you succeed, it'll likely only be by a small margin, and you'll have to keep reinvesting into your product, inhibiting or denying it from evolving into a cash cow.

The less features mantra has been the new black for some time now. However, in reality features are a good thing. The real evil is when features become features, knobs and whistles for their own sake. When I first used an Android phone after using the iPhone, I found it hard to do simple things that seemed "intuitive" on the iPhone (kill an app for example). Those are most definitely features, not the in your face, sticker happy, slogan heavy gimmicks but something that took a team to think through and deliver. These features are amazing because they are executed to be either intuitive or "accidentally" discoverable.

When you look at the way Apple releases, they focus on what matters at that given moment, pushing aside something that might seem as essential as "copy and paste", rather than deliver half-baked solutions. So, when I read articles like this, it makes you wonder why Nokia is struggling against smartphones. After all they nailed the basic features? It's a phone isn't it?

I got some things to think about from this.. thanks for posting it. Been working head down on http://infostripe.com for so long that sometimes I have to remember to look up and consider what we am presenting to people.

I guess you have somehow define feature to not include 'ease of use' or any features of the interface in order to make this article apply.

Otherwise, I totally disagree. That the users can use your product smoothly and efficiently IS a feature.

The article doesn't say "Don't build features", it says "Don't compete on features". In other words, what is your focus when it comes to selling your product or service? Andrew is arguing that the focus should be on a unique experiental aspect of the service and not raw features. To that I would also add "Don't compete on price". That's not to say that you shouldn't have a price, or that the price shouldn't be competitive, but simply, that price isn't your primary differentiator. We differentiate on service, but we've also got some great features and competitive pricing - we just don't dwell on it. Decent features and good prices are just table stakes - service is our ante and we're all-in.

What is a product if not the sum of its features? Features aren't extraneous things, they are what your product actually does.

This article strikes me as one big platitude to be honest. Yes, simplifying your interface and creating well defined interactions are very good things. Yes, your product will be better (and more successful) as it gets easier to use. I agree with that, but that doesn't mean stripping away functionality is always the right approach.

Most here would agree that the iPhone is a pretty functional device. Its hardly "simple". It does a ton of things really well. It's not that the device has stripped away features, it's that they have implemented all of those features really well.

I guess I'm saying this: don't blame features for terrible UX. Blame poor engineering.

edit: I also want to address this:

You’ll never win on features against a market leader*

This might be true, but not always. Often you can clearly differentiate your product at some low level, but you still have to build out a commiserate feature set to satisfy customer needs. In the end you have a better product, but adoption is slowed until you achieve feature-level parity (at least on certain core features).

Old adage: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." If the whole meets/exceeds user expectations, you don't need to list the parts. If you're listing the parts, you're trying to distract the customer from the inadequate whole by saying the parts are good enough.

A product is what the features allow you to do. No single feature is the product.

I agree that competing on features seems like a mistake (one reason why I think Google+ will not fare that well). But competing on price I think is actually a very different matter. Price changes everything. Price can make the difference between feeling like a sucker or feeling like you just had a marvelous experience.

Take something like the iPad. With all of its beauty and design, had it started at $899 or $999 like many speculated, it would have done far poorer. Like potentially flopped. Apple knew price was extremely important and so they were very aggressive on it.

The Kindle and Nook are such good sellers, in part, because of their price. They're the impulse buys while you're standing at the checkstand. With that said price isn't always a factor (and in some cases more expensive is better than cheaper), but you should treat price just as you would UX and design -- very seriously.

I'm the author of the article. Great comment and exactly describes what I was trying to convey.

it shouldn't be a feature, but a prerequisite. But that's a hopeful dream... Defining for whom it is easy to use looks more like a feature

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