True ;) Sometimes, though, a new feature isn't getting engagement because people are busy. Product and Product marketing can use low engagement metrics to raise awareness.
Good point! Talking to some of the users of the feature you're about to remove is probably a good first step. Do those users use the feature in a way that's aligned with your product strategy?
Randomly, take 10%-25% of your users, show them the feature and see if they do more of what you want them to do.
If you're blogging platform, that would be writing more blogs, or whatever metric that guides your business growth.
If yes, then roll-it out to 50%, confirm that the metrics are moving to the same direction and by how much. You should be able to answer the question: "users who have this feature do $X more/less/faster/etc.."
You can implement this all in house or use one of the tens of A/B testing SaaS out-there.
Hi, I’m the solo founder of Bucket. I’ve built this tool to easily measure the success of software features. Out of the box, Bucket will tell you how many users are engaging with your feature, and how often (daily, weekly, monthly). That’s it! It’s simple but enough to be actionable.
I’ve needed something like this in previous SaaS companies. For whatever reason, traditional product analytics platforms were never adopted outside of a small group of product managers. Bucket is analytics for the individual features.
I hope that software teams (engineers, designers, product, etc.) will consider using this. Sometimes we need to ship less new features and iterate on existing ones. Maybe even delete some features once in a while! :)
Fully agree regarding "collaboration". The "money" argument is what I'm arguing against in the post. You can pack more engineers in an open office, but if the software output is low, you're not saving money - you're carelessly wasting resources.
Unfortunately, humans are generally short-sighted. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
Also, I imagine a lot of these managers would disagree with you about the output; they'll claim that collaboration boosts output, improves quality, etc. Of course, it's all just hand-waving with no evidence. To get any real evidence, you'd have to do some kind of study doing identical or similar projects in both environments. And even then, different people are different: some people might actually be more productive in an open environment. It probably really depends a lot on the personality type of the programmer, and on how they prefer to work. A lot of today's hipster programmers really do like open offices.
Ever shipped a feature and didn’t know, if the customers loved it?
Validate features in weeks with Bucket.
Job description: https://bucket.co/jobs/senior-full-stack-typescript-engineer