To Add Features or Remove Them - That is the Question

One is a whole lot harder than the other

Oct 18, 2022

Taking things away in a product is always harder than adding them. Think through the easy "sure we can add that" it starts small, but quickly becomes an unpolished in-cohesive experience. Just because you can add something small, doesn't mean you should.

Craig has a great point here that is not mentioned enough in startup building. One of the biggest benefits for startups is that incumbents have products (or even platforms) that have a huge amount of features needed to serve the multiple users at large enterprises. But while that is a strength for Global 2000 customers, it is actually a weakness for many of the smaller customers that make up a huge part of the economy.

We’ve all been there. You start a new job and IT tells you to set up your tech stack. You have to figure out how to use everything. You sit and look at the Salesforce CRM instance with custom fields, various integrations, and ten different buttons you can click on. You spend a full day trying to figure out how to use ADP to set up payroll and benefits. You’re likely not productive till maybe week 2. (cough cough my experience at most major banks).

Then you join a startup. The time to value in using the products is hours. You already know how to use G-Suite or Microsoft Office. The Hubspot CRM has about 5 essential fields. Gusto asks you a few questions and you’re good to go.

This is why the opportunity to build new startups exist!

Removing features in the early days is a core strength of startups vs incumbents. A simpler user experience leads to quicker time to value for the end user. It allows the product’s core differentiation to shine through and be experienced more easily. It means less cognitive load on the user to learn the product. And remember unlike more mature products who have 1) contracts enforcing usage by IT saying “we purchased this so we use this” and 2) word of mouth love by a previous user saying “hey onboarding may be tough but once you understand it, it’s amazing”, a startup is starting from zero. The end user has to be convinced of the value from the demo, sandbox, first use, etc. The more features, the more explanation needed, the more documentation and experimentation the end user needs to do to get to the core value.

The paradox of course is startups don’t just add new features because it’s cool (it sometimes is pretty cool though). But actually because end users and customers indicate that they want those features and will pay for it. The question becomes is that end user/customer representative of the whole customer base or just a narrow segment. Are they avid users of legacy enterprise products and expect certain features or are they early adopters that are trying to solve a pain point that hasn’t been solved by existing products? These are the sort of questions founders and early startup teams need to ask themselves when evaluating feature requests to figure out what to build now or later.

“When you narrow focus, you are increasing the resourcing on the remaining priority. It doesn’t have to time-slice and compete any more with a bunch of other stuff.” - Frank Slootman - h/t Karim Fanous on his newsletter Cumulative

Another benefit to removing features is addressed in Frank Slootman’s quote above. By narrowing the focus of the team, the amount of resources on the remaining items increases. This happens cross teams. In engineering, not building new features can mean improving the infrastructure and reliability of the core product. In sales, it means less product messaging and battlecards to learn so the key value can be more easily remembered and delivered to the customer.

On the flip side, all the larger companies need to keep adding new features to grow their TAM, expand their share of customer revenue and go further upmarket to larger and larger customers. This is also why it’s so hard for these companies to move back downstream. They would need to remove features to reduce the cognitive load for end users to get the same adoption that they get when they sell to a CXO at a F500 and get forced enterprise wide adoption.

Every 10 years or so we get refresh cycles in software. From PeopleSoft → Salesfore → Hubspot → Freshworks or whatever other CRM vendor you want to choose from. This does not mean the incumbents fail. They continue to move upmarket and outwards as they deepen the bench of features and addressable markets that they target. But they leave their flank exposed to a better user experience in a certain area of pain that startups can exploit to then become a leader themselves. And over time, you indeed can see the companies start to falter. Look at AWS with $62B revenue compared to Oracle’s $42B at very different growth rates. Snowflake vs Hadoop, Salesforce vs PeopleSoft. We’re seeing it now even at the larger company level with Atlassian taking on ITSM vs ServiceNow. Dope Security, a boldstart portfolio company, taking on legacy Secure Web Gateways like Z-Scaler, Cisco, and more.

That refresh cycle exists because what used to be amazing product experiences become bloated and “legacy tech”. Incumbents continue to march up-market and make more money. Founders analyze these products, realize the end user experience is terrible and the core value of the product is obstructed. They then create new products that solve those features better eventually taking share from the incumbents.

So moral of the story. No matter how hard it is, always ask when creating a new feature why that feature is needed and if an existing feature can be removed to make the product easier to use for the end user. You of course need to build new features to expand market share and revenue growth, but thoughtfully adding them at the right time can make a huge difference to the staying power and growth of the product.

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