Building Features for Customer Retention

blog.raghuveer.info

17 points·_raghu··4 comments

Too many features really is a problem.

In the beginning you get customers who complain about the lack of features, but after a while customers start to complain, that there are too many features. Since this started to hurt us, we are now hiding features. As the customers become familiar with the software, they start requesting this feature or that. It's only a matter of activating the feature for this particular customer. Easy as cake.

Another approach we're thinking about is feature levels. Like levels in games the customer gains access to new feature levels by completing the current level. Or the software could activate features after a certain amount of time. Like when a customer installs a software and updates it every couple of months. With each update they get new features. They have time to get familiar with the new features. And after a while new features are revealed.

In the end, I don't think it's a good idea to cripple the software just to keep it simple.

I think the OP's argument is that a lot of reactive feature-building (irrespective of how they are organized) is a bad idea - especially in the early stages of a product.

Interesting idea to hide features and activate it only for customers who request it. similar to gmail labs in my opinion. In our case, it slowly became difficult for us to manage the interface with many permutations possible based on what features were active. For now, we put that hold. Did you get into any such issues?

The problem mainly was too many configuration options. There is basically one user view (calendar) that is controlled by a bunch of options. Those options grew in numbers over the years. We just hide the more obscure ones until a customer comes along and asks for it.

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