(2021-03-09) Chen The Next Feature Fallacy The Fallacy That The Next New Feature Will Suddenly Make People Use Your Product

Andrew Chen: The Next Feature Fallacy: The fallacy that the next new feature will suddenly make people use your product.

A few weeks ago, I read this tweet, and found myself nodding my head in vigorous agreement.

• Joshua Porter, May'2015: The Next Feature Fallacy: the fallacy that the next feature you add will suddenly make people want to use the entire product.

For people who love to build product, when something’s not working, it’s tempting to simply build more product... However, this rarely works, and when you look at the metrics, it’s obvious why.

The above diagram (user-adoption funnel) shows the precipitous drop-off between initially attracting a user versus the difficulty of retaining them over the first month. (AARRR)

Two mistakes are often made when designing features meant to bend this engagement curve:

Too few people will use the feature. In particular, that the features target engaged/retained users rather than non-users and new users

Too little impact is made when they do engage. Especially the case when important/key functions are displayed like optional actions outside of the onboarding process

Another frame to think about is to make sure a new feature doesn’t assume deep engagement/investment in your product. Let’s introduce the concept of an engagement wall, which exists at the moment that your product asks the user to deeply invest in their product usage, where “behind the wall” means that the feature can only be experienced once the users buys into a product, and engages.

Picking the features that bend the curve requires a strong understanding of your user lifecycle.

First and foremost is maximizing the reach of your feature, so it impacts the most people. It’s a good rule of thumb that the best features often focus mostly on non-users and casual users, with the reason that there’s simply many more of them.

Similarly, it’s important to have deep insights on what users need to do to become activated, so that their first visit is set up properly. (cf Aha moment)

kicks off a number of loops that will bring them back later on

set up their experience for success.