The Three Goals of any Product Feature
One of the product articles I often revisit is the Guide to Product Planning: Three Feature Buckets by Adam Nash. I love this article for the simple framework for building a roadmap by focusing on elements of moving key metrics, addressing customer requests, and inspiring delight.
In a similar vein, I contend that any product feature can be tied to at least one of three goals.
Growth
Driving more users to the product
This is work you believe will drive new user growth — acquiring new users or helping existing users get activated and begin using the product. The rising popularity of product-led go-to-market strategies in Saas companies has meant more focus in this area for many product teams.
Retention
Get people to use the product more
Improve retention and engagement with the product by working on features that will get people to continue to use your product and come back more often. Retention drives word-of-mouth growth and is the best indicator of product-market fit. If you are interested in what “good retention” looks like, Lenny Ratchisky covered this topic in-depth.
Efficiency
Improve operating leverage
Make it easier to support, scale, or monetize the product now and into the future to improve operating margins and efficiency. This could include fixing bugs to reduce support volume, automating manual processes, resolving technical debt, or building and iterating on pricing and other monetization capabilities.
This type of work rarely makes sense to prioritize until you’ve found product-market fit and are operating at scale. Until that point, you’re only goals should be growth and/or retention.
What did I miss? Are there any other goals you’ve had when building a new feature?
As always, thank you for reading.
Alex Pedicini
P.S. I’ve launched Product Templates Library - a collection of product templates and artifacts for PMs. There are over 30 templates, from defining a product strategy to product 1-pagers and requirements docs.