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When features dominate product strategy, product managers have less influence over the direction of future offerings because quantity is prioritized over quality. Innovative, slow-developing products are replaced by hitting quarterly feature quotas.
With each iteration of the iPhone, consumers anticipate what new features Apple will unveil next. The company does a brilliant job of building excitement for bigger screens, better cameras, crisper photos, and other additions to its wildly popular product. In fact, very few companies roll out new features better than Apple.
Unfortunately, many companies take a cue from the iPhone and tend to go overboard. They become feature factories—organizations focusing more on adding new features to existing products than bringing new products to market. While new features are critical to extending a product's relevance and market life, over-reliance on features can kill innovation over time.
Organizations looking to regain their footing as new product innovators should look no further than at their product managers. The best product management solutions can help create innovative offerings that might never see the light of day.
Many companies begin with innovation as their North Star and invest countless cycles to create an innovative product that will either solve a new customer problem or address an existing problem in a new way. After establishing credibility with a market-disrupting product—or a series of them—it becomes critical to implement new features that will enhance the original product and keep customers interested, and their needs met.
Often, this is where many organizations place less emphasis on new product innovation. Features require less legwork than creating a new product from the ground up and can generate considerable revenue. The shift from new product development to feature development sometimes occurs during economic downturns when an influx of revenue is necessary to maintain market share. To be clear, features and product refactoring are important strategies, but they shouldn’t be the focus.
When features dominate product strategy, product managers have less influence over the direction of future offerings because organizations prioritize quantity over quality. Innovative, slow-developing products are replaced by hitting quarterly feature quotas. Many companies even incentivize product managers for how many features they push out on time.
At this point, you wonder if the role should still be called ‘product manager.’ They’re no longer dreaming up new solutions but instead managing v14.4. This conundrum plays a significant role in product manager burnout, as the job they were hired to do moves from a creative process into a succession of box-checking.
Organizations that want to move away from a feature-first model should shift the power to product managers and let them build and develop market-differentiating products.
These inherent qualities of a good product manager help move the output balance away from features.
While product managers have the skills necessary to lead a shift to a PLG-focused model, they can’t do it alone. It’s nearly impossible to manage all aspects of the product journey, such as monitoring product health, making data-driven decisions, navigating tradeoffs, and informing stakeholders of the latest updates.
When product managers are equipped with the right product management tools, they can leverage their talents, knowledge, and skills to optimize the new product development process and access the information necessary to gain buy-in from decision-makers.
Such tools give product managers the power to focus on:
Creating a steady stream of disruptive products is certainly not easy, and there are many compelling reasons to drift toward a feature-first model. But companies that are intent on prioritizing innovation and consistently addressing emerging customer problems are putting more trust than ever in their product managers. And companies that do it best have the product management tools necessary to maximize their product managers’ many talents.