Features Not Made Equal
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Dima poses that every product feature falls on one side of a "hygiene bar," and he and Slava explore where that line sits, how it shifts over time, and whether the idea can become more than his own intuition.
- Ranking every feature on one universal scale assumes they're commensurable, which is rarely true
- Jim McCarthy's five feature categories (from Dynamics of Software Development)
- Strategic features are the basic, must-have ones needed just to compete (a counterintuitive name for them).
- Competitive features are what differentiate the product from the competition.
- Customer satisfaction features fix what's already annoying existing users.
- Investment features are under-the-hood work that pays off in a later release.
- Paradigmatic features change how people use the product entirely, like the iPhone arriving as "an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator."
- Other models pointing at similar asymmetries
- The Kano model holds that some features only prevent dissatisfaction when present, while others create delight without being punished for their absence
- Terry Hill's order qualifiers and order winners draw the same line in manufacturing strategy: qualifiers get you into the race, winners are what let you win it.
- Dima crystalises this into the idea of a hygiene bar. Below the bar, a missing feature penalizes the product but having it earns little. Above the bar, features differentiate, but only once the product already clears the bar
- Hygiene bar is an expression of the market. Shifting hygiene bar allows to trace how market evolves. E.g. Command strips moved the market of "means of hanging things on walls"
- McCarthy's categories and the hygiene bar: strategic and customer-satisfaction features sit below the bar, competitive features sit above it, and investment features stay neutral until a later release. Paradigmatic features are the odd one out: they move the existing bar, pushing new requirements onto competitors.
"Apples are apples — you can't make a paradigm shift with an apple as a product." — Dima
