This post has be "baking" in the back of my mind for quite a while now and I think it's almost done baking.
I got the idea to write this post while I was working at my previous employer. There I would develop some pretty complicated functionalities that took a long time to develop with quite some effort. And after that I was frustrated because those functionalities were hardly used anywhere. So my question after that was why did we develop them anyway?
After those incidents I happen to read about the release of some new mobile phone. I think it was the release of Samsung Galaxy S9. It had around 98% of the same features as the previous model, the S8, including the main functionalities used by everyone. The new functionalities were hardly used by anyone. But on the other hand it gave the consumers a reason to upgrade their phone. And it gave other consumers that were looking into buying a new phone a reason to buy a Galaxy S9 over another phone from another brand.
As a consumer if I have to choose between 2 phones from different brands, even if both phones do the things I am most likely to need I would still choose the phone with more additional features over the other phone with less features because why not?
This made me realize that in the end the software that I was building was a piece of technology exactly like the Galaxy S9. And just like the S9 it also had a designated market segment with various consumers. And these consumers have a wide variety of products to chose from, including the one I was working on. So just like the telephone mentioned earlier, I was giving the customers additional reasons to buy out software by implementing these functionalities. They were actually designed to spark the interest of the customers and make them say "Wow!". Even if they were very unlikely to use those features, the simple fact that our product could do those things would make a very good impression of the product to our customers and convince them to buy our product instead of another competing product.
But one major caveat of this approach is that it works mostly with consumers that already made up their mind to buy a new product. Attracting existing customers that do not explicitly want to upgrade to a new product is harder. I think this approach is useful when you have a new product that you are trying to introduce to the market.
Now this isn't a general rule and in some cases you add a feature that only used 1% of the time because you have a key existing customer that demanded that feature and you can't afford to neglect his demands. Actually this can be turned into something good because if that customer is important or big then you can turn his case into a success story which then can be used to attract even more customers. I think at my last job we had a customer like this that was at the forefront of our product. And now that I think about it at my new job, there isn't just one such customers. There are several of them and they share their testimonials on the main product page. If you can get even one or two of these big customers to use your product and share their stories, you will gain traction and others will also start to adopt the product.
In the end, there is actually a pretty tight relationship between the people that market a product, the people that design that product and the people which actually develop it.
I got the idea to write this post while I was working at my previous employer. There I would develop some pretty complicated functionalities that took a long time to develop with quite some effort. And after that I was frustrated because those functionalities were hardly used anywhere. So my question after that was why did we develop them anyway?
After those incidents I happen to read about the release of some new mobile phone. I think it was the release of Samsung Galaxy S9. It had around 98% of the same features as the previous model, the S8, including the main functionalities used by everyone. The new functionalities were hardly used by anyone. But on the other hand it gave the consumers a reason to upgrade their phone. And it gave other consumers that were looking into buying a new phone a reason to buy a Galaxy S9 over another phone from another brand.
As a consumer if I have to choose between 2 phones from different brands, even if both phones do the things I am most likely to need I would still choose the phone with more additional features over the other phone with less features because why not?
This made me realize that in the end the software that I was building was a piece of technology exactly like the Galaxy S9. And just like the S9 it also had a designated market segment with various consumers. And these consumers have a wide variety of products to chose from, including the one I was working on. So just like the telephone mentioned earlier, I was giving the customers additional reasons to buy out software by implementing these functionalities. They were actually designed to spark the interest of the customers and make them say "Wow!". Even if they were very unlikely to use those features, the simple fact that our product could do those things would make a very good impression of the product to our customers and convince them to buy our product instead of another competing product.
But one major caveat of this approach is that it works mostly with consumers that already made up their mind to buy a new product. Attracting existing customers that do not explicitly want to upgrade to a new product is harder. I think this approach is useful when you have a new product that you are trying to introduce to the market.
Now this isn't a general rule and in some cases you add a feature that only used 1% of the time because you have a key existing customer that demanded that feature and you can't afford to neglect his demands. Actually this can be turned into something good because if that customer is important or big then you can turn his case into a success story which then can be used to attract even more customers. I think at my last job we had a customer like this that was at the forefront of our product. And now that I think about it at my new job, there isn't just one such customers. There are several of them and they share their testimonials on the main product page. If you can get even one or two of these big customers to use your product and share their stories, you will gain traction and others will also start to adopt the product.
In the end, there is actually a pretty tight relationship between the people that market a product, the people that design that product and the people which actually develop it.
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