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| Microsoft Bing AI Generated |
A Head of Product recently suggested to me that sometimes you have features to sell with, and features users want. I strongly disagree - as it has profound implications for a product organisation when they start building a set of features specifically to sell a feature rather than be used by users. I say this as a present Product Manager and former Technical Salesperson. Let me explain my thoughts.
Sales demo driven development
The product cohort have spent years moving businesses away from sales driven development, where we drip feed a constant stream of features which only serve to close individual deals. A great article on this can be found by Rich Mironov here: https://www.mironov.com/sales-led/. Sales driven development can be quite dangerous for a product, what's worse is sales demo driven development, where you are essentially building a product or even vapourware to woo or wow a customer to sign or tick in the box rather than solve an underlying problem. When you do this, you are wasting valuable business resources chasing good feedback at conferences over building solutions that actually have an impact for your users.
Buy vs Use
The person buying the product can be different to the person using the product, and therefore there can be misaligned expectations on the customer-end about what they want to buy vs what they want to use. This is where good salespeople are worth their weight in gold - breaking through the procurement office and making them understand the product is what their users want. We as a product team need to build solutions for our customers, which add value and improve some aspect of their work. If we build sales features, we are not focusing on the end customer problem. If our users are not using the products we build them, we have failed in our role as a Product Manager.
Promises broken
The business world relies on trust, and more than once I've seen customers kick vying sales reps out of their board room muttering "used car salespeople". You may be able to sell the product to the customer once, and they may never actually use it (which is a whole another problem), but if they ever try, they're going to quickly find out it doesn't actually fit their needs. This creates problems for customer success, creating backlog items that are either very high priority, or forgotten, depending on how much they pay and/or shout. Ultimately though it creates broken trust and promises, which are very hard to forget when the next RFP rolls around.
The market research excuse
There is one situation where having a fake or "sales" feature works, which is when you're trying to conduct market research on if someone will actually want to use it, or experimenting to see the usage of a feature. These situations are quite different - as the goal is to conduct research rather than sell. One is a research tool, the other is a commitment ploy. Be careful on your reasons why.
Build features that users want, and sells
The answer to this is quite simple - don't build features for the sake of selling it at a conference or board room demo. Put your product manager hat on, do the research, be the voice of the customer, and rally your teams to develop features that customers genuinely see value in, and will want to use. If done correctly, you will make it far easier for your company to close deals through tangible value.