Real-World Examples of Feature / Product Fit
In part 1 and part 2 of our three-part guide to feature / product fit, we provided a framework to determine whether your features actually fit your product.
Here, in this final part of the guide, we provide real-world examples.
First, we’ll analyze a feature that strongly fits its product. Then, we’ll dissect a feature that failed to fit its product. By doing so, we can maximize our ability to ship truly impactful products that unlock multiplicative synergies across the product portfolio.
Real-life example of a feature with solid feature / product fit
At one point, I worked at a company creating productivity tools for lenders, and my area of ownership was the “lender workspace” hub that enabled loan officers and loan processors to tackle various digital workflows.
My particular “metric to move” was weekly active users, with the hypothesis that “the more lenders are logging in, the more valuable they find our product, and the more likely they’ll stay with us over the long run.”
Our company metric was “funded loan volume” - that is, how many loans made it from initial application submission through to decisioning to underwriting and all the way through to funding.
As a company, we were paid a “per funded loan” transaction cost, so funded loan volume directly correlated to company revenue.
Our past initiatives on the lender workspace did move weekly active users upward, but failed to sufficiently change funded loan volume.
At that point in time, we had many different productivity tools available in the hub, and each of them had their own entry points and user experiences.
For example, one tab was the “loan overview” page with information at a glance, but it also had a bunch of functionality that had been crammed into it over time.
Another tab was a “loan details” page where users could update the information on a loan, and yet another one was a “loan activities” page where users could see which actions had been taken on the loan.
Each of these tabs had organically come up with their own workflows and user experiences, but this was incredibly difficult for loan officers and loan processors to navigate.
The look and feel of each tab was different, and users regularly got lost or got stuck trying to find a particular function that was hidden away in a tab that they didn’t expect.
In fact, we regularly had to spend 10+ hours per customer account to onboard their 100’s of loan officers onto this lender workspace.
We considered shipping a feature to walk users through each of the different tabs and see if we could increase retention that way.
But, we figured that the walkthrough functionality would wind up creating more visual noise and wouldn’t help fix the root cause of disorganized UX.
So, we decided not to ship a new feature within this feature set.
Rather, we decided to redesign the entire lender workspace so that the information architecture, navigation, and general user experience was more cohesive and intuitive.
Our core hypothesis was that the faster we can help users get through each of their workflows, the more efficient they will be, which means the more loans they can get funded overall.
And, we wanted to ensure that customers knew it was coming.
We tested this revamped loan header with customers to get their feedback, and we knew we were on the right track as overwhelmingly positive reviews flooded in.
But, even with such encouraging signals, we decided against a single-phase rollout.
Rather, we released this revamp in customer-driven phases.
Customers signed up for dates that would work for them to switch from the olde experience to the new experience.
From there, they worked backwards from the date and coordinated with our CSMs and support teams to successfully onboard into the revamped user experience.
By ensuring that our customers had clear internal messaging for moving their users onto a new user experience, we maximized adoption and minimized disruption.
To be clear, shipping functionality with feature / product fit is not the most glamorous thing in the world.
As the PM for this work, I didn’t have any “individual metrics” to move. After all, a redesigned experience doesn’t have a measurable CTA (call to action), so I didn’t have exciting metrics of my own to share.
And, I didn’t have an attribution model to determine how much revenue our new revamp had earned us.
This initiative wasn’t the most visible work for our executives, and this work didn’t actively lead to a promotion in my career trajectory.
But, this work was truly crucial to the company.
By overhauling the lender workspace, we found that within the first 2-4 months after deployment, we saw a sustained and significant change in valuable business metrics:
Increase in weekly active users
Decrease in onboarding time per customer
Decrease in inbound customer support tickets
Jumping back to our framework of feature / product fit, the three levers of business value available for any product is acquisition, retention, and monetization.
Let’s assess how this functionality performed against these three levers.
Acquisition: Marketing the revamp wasn’t a key part of our strategy, as we wanted to focus our marketing efforts elsewhere. Therefore, we didn’t directly drive increased user acquisition through this work.
Retention: We saw stronger retention for users, because the lender workspace was significantly easier to use. Qualitatively, users mentioned that they were now excited to leverage our functionality, whereas previously they would purposely do work offline because our functionality was so hard to use.
Monetization: Because users could navigate the workspace more quickly, they were able to drive more loans due to increased productivity. This then increased monetization for the company through increased funded loan volume.
Additional considerations: Even better, we were able to increase the margins for our business too. We decreased the operational costs required to train new customers and to support existing customers, and this profit improvement was sustained over the long run.
So, this functionality demonstrated solid feature / product fit. It successfully increased our business value levers by creating net-new value for users.
For coaching and hands-on guidance on how to build with feature / product fit in mind, consider booking a session with our experienced PM career coaches.
So now we have a tangible example of a feature that fit its product value proposition.
Let’s now walk through a real world example of a “highly successful” feature that wound up damaging its product.
Real-life example of a feature that didn’t fit its product
Here’s an example of the reverse: a feature that did not fit its product.
At one point, I worked for a real estate search engine company. We monetized through lead generation for real estate agents.
Essentially, we would help buyers find properties to visit, and we would encourage buyers to call a real estate agent to work with them.
From there, once the real estate agent closed the deal with that client, we would then take a portion of the agent’s commission.
One of our product teams focused on driving traffic to the search engine. Their idea was to create a sweepstakes where users could win exciting prizes such as cash or Apple products.
They ran a quick market survey to see what kinds of prizes people would be most interested in, and used this as their proof point that they had excellent customer demand.
And at first, they looked like they had hit a home run!
The sweepstakes product had truly impressive metrics.
It shattered all-time records for traffic to the site, and also drove huge conversion percentages to create accounts with email addresses, since you had to create an account with our company to be enrolled in the sweepstakes.
Even better, this team saw huge virality because users shared it with others through word of mouth to get additional entries into the sweepstakes.
And, the cost of acquisition for these leads were significantly lower than the cost of Google Ads or offline ads like newspapers or billboards, since the company only needed to have the fixed cost of the sweepstakes prizes.
Because this functionality was such a success, the team ran monthly sweepstakes for a year.
Yet, curiously, even though their functionality drove amazing metric performance month-over-month, the company north star metric of “buyers who book open house appointments with real estate agents” dropped off significantly during that same timeframe.
Why was that?
Well, in hindsight, we found that the users on the sweepstakes mailing list never wanted to buy a house in the first place.
This created a lot of operational overhead where our call center agents would try to nurture these leads by calling them, but would repeatedly find that the overwhelming majority of these leads did not want to transact with us.
While these leads had excellent “upfront conversion”, they had terrible “transaction conversion.” Almost no one who had enrolled in the sweepstakes was willing to speak with a real estate agent to book a visit to an open house.
In other words: just because they converted excellently upstream didn’t mean that they converted well downstream.
On top of that, we started having a market perception of being “the company that runs sweepstakes and giveaways”, not as “the company that successfully connects you with a real estate agent to help you buy a home.”
As you can see here, the root of the problem was that the traffic product team had a north star metric that was not fully tied to business value.
Traffic on its own does not provide value to the business. That is, only traffic that turns into transactions really mattered.
So, this product team either needed to implement a counter metric like “transaction conversion rate,” or they needed to measure “number of visits that turn into transactions” as a clearer north star metric rather than just simple “visits.”
They never identified “how would this sweepstakes help you achieve your ultimate goal of buying a new home?”
This miss in “solving the core pain of the customer” was ultimately what led to the misalignment of this feature with the product.
Closing thoughts
Congrats on making it through our in-depth guide to feature / product fit! You’re now armed with the ability to determine whether your features fit your products.
As a product manager, you want to ship multiplicative value.
Therefore, you need to prioritize with feature / product fit in mind, and you need to take the time to find and measure this fit.
As a manager of PMs, you need to ensure that the work of your individual contributors synergizes together well.
You’ll need to come up with a product philosophy that ties together your working processes, as well as a product strategy that ties together the historical outputs and future roadmaps of your direct reports.
By using the framework of feature / product fit, we can establish and maintain market leadership in the niches that we decide to attack as a product organization.
Thank you to Pauli Bielewicz, Siamak Khorrami, Goutham Budati, Markus Seebauer, Juliet Chuang, and Kendra Ritterhern for making this guide possible.
