Avoid feature overload!

Hello and welcome to today's episode. I'm Ian Peterman, host of Conscious Design, and today's episode is part of our Launch Product series. And I want to talk about avoiding feature overload. So product development, it's pretty easy to overload your product with features. And it's not a good thing to do most of the time. So I'll talk about what is feature overload, what does it mean, what does it mean for product development, why too many features usually leads to confusion, avoiding marketing nightmares that are usually associated with overloading your product with features, and how features are part of your product strategy overall, especially when developing a product line and thinking about future products that you're going to want to come out with. So first, what is feature overload? So feature overload, really simply, is putting too many features into a single product, making it too generic or too complicated to use. So for example, think about, you know, you have a Swiss Army knife, has a few tools, is great. And then you've probably seen at some point a picture on Facebook or somewhere else That shows you the supersized pocket knife where it expands to like 3 feet long and has every single tool in it that you could ever possibly need on the planet, all within a Swiss Army pocket knife. Obviously, you can't use that. That is feature overload. There are too many, too many features, too many tools, too many options. It becomes an unusable product. And so basically You don't need to go that extreme, but anytime that you move into a space where the product becomes cumbersome to use, or it takes a crazy instruction manual just to use something that should be pretty simple, then we're talking about feature overload, and that's what we want to avoid. Second, let's talk about why too many features usually equals confusion. So When you give people options, options are good. Options are always great to have. However, based on everything I've ever seen and read, you know, the numbers range, but usually if you give people more than 3 to 5 options, it starts to become a process of decision that involves a lot of decision-making rather than just a quick, oh, I see 3 options, here you go. Begins to put confusion into the mix because there's too many options to think about. So this comes to— comes down to why companies, a lot of companies, don't offer you unlimited colors when picking a product. They don't offer unlimited options when picking a product because too many products lead to you debating about which one should I have too long. And if you go through it, if you take too long through a decision process, well, the chances of you saying yes to it decrease because it's going to require so much thinking in order to make that decision. Now, when it comes to products, you don't necessarily need to stick to just 3 to 5. There's many different applications where products should have more than 5 features attached to it. Think about a car. It's got a lot of features loaded into it. You need more than 5 features typically just to drive a vehicle these days. So there's places where you definitely have a larger space that you can put features in, and your feature quantity can be larger in certain areas. However, you still don't want to have too many things there because, again, it's too many options. So think about control board. We like— the reason why people love working on iPads and using mobile platforms is usually it's a lot more simple design. It's not a crazy control switchboard. You know, you don't have 50 buttons in one little block and they're all badly labeled. So you want to think about what's the usability factor. If you have to go through 50 options to find the one that you're looking for in order to use that feature of a product, how long does that take? Does that take a second? Well, what's the product being used for? Do they need to be able to get to the feature in under a second? So thinking about how long it's going to take someone to get to the feature that you want them to use or they're going to need, that can impact how many features you have. That's why, you know, a lot of times if you think about like tools and toolboxes, some people have multi-tools, but often you have one tool, you have a hammer. And a screwdriver, and those are your common tools. Yeah, you may have some bits for your screwdriver, but you don't carry around a hundred bit case that you can dig through to hopefully find the right one. You have commonly used ones. So thinking about your features in that way will help you avoid confusion because if you have too many options, you have too many features you're going to dig through. It can take so much time that people end up being frustrated with the product and will sometimes just walk away, go. Buy a more basic product. And now your product is not going to get good reviews. People aren't going to use it. People aren't going to like it. You'll have people that do. So the other kind of side to this coin here is that there are people that will want all of those features in one convenient place, and they're okay with cycling through a bunch of things or taking a little bit longer to get to the tool that they want because they want all of those features in one device. So think a little bit about your exact market, but keep that in mind that, you know, you're depending on your market, they may not want to have all the features that you want. Third thing to talk about here is avoiding marketing nightmares. If you have too many features, nobody can market 1,000 features to a single person. When it comes to marketing, you're going to talk about a couple key features. Those are the selling points. Those are the main features. That's what your product is known for, what your product is categorized. You know, when people categorize products on Amazon or in other platforms or put it in a store, it's not like they're going to categorize it in 1,000 different places. They're going to put a couple general categories, and that's where people are going to find it. That's where people are going to, going to see that it shows up under. So you want to think about what are those features that are primary, and if you have 50 primary features, then they aren't primary features anymore. And so when you do that, marketing is going to have a really bad time trying to market a product that has too many features because that becomes too generic, too general, and it's really hard to market extremely generalized products. Even if you think about Paper, printer paper. It gets marketed in a specific way to a group of people. Everybody buys it. People buy it all the time that aren't marketed for it or marketed to about it. But marketing needs something specific because they need to tell a story that connects with an individual person. And so they're gonna pick, if you, if you develop a product, whoever does your marketing, they're going to pick 1 or 2, maybe, maybe up to 5 features. But oftentimes, once you can get above 1 or 2 features, it means you're selling to somebody else, and now you're creating a whole new marketing campaign. And so in order to avoid that, you want to make sure that your product has primary features and then some supportive features, and that's typically where it kind of wants to end. And Granted, number of features can vary between products. It varies depending on the market category that you're in, how many features are acceptable or easily understood. So again, with the car, there's many features. There's many features of the car. You don't have to explain all of that. So that's also the other thing to think about is, yeah, your product does— maybe it has a bunch of features, But which ones are ones that people already know how to use without any question? They don't need any explanation. Those are ones that marketing's not going to focus on because they're not unique. They're not special. They're not newsworthy. They don't create anything worth marketing about. They're going to focus on the features that are special, unique, do something that nobody else does, combines things that nobody else does. Or are going to need a little bit more thinking in order to understand how to use. The last thing that I want to talk about is how features are part of product strategy. So when you have a bunch of features, so maybe you do sit down and go, I want a product and we have a need here. We have customers that want these 50 features. Great. Maybe that doesn't all fit into one product. Maybe that becomes 5 products, maybe it becomes 10 products. It could become 50 separate products too. But if you sit down and that's what you really have, you really know that you have 50 problems to solve, then what you're going to end up doing is taking that, those features and creating a product strategy with it. You don't need to shove it all into one product. It's not almost never the best idea to do that. You want to break that into usable products, which is great because it helps you create a roadmap of how releasing new products to help your customers and how that extends down the road so you're— you have more new products to bring to market, be able to generate more buzz around it, and be able to help people with that. And you want to break that up typically over time, but there's also times where it's really smart to say, okay, well, we have these 50 problems that we're going to solve. We have these 50 features that are going to, going to be needed by our clients. Our customers really want this. These 30 are the most important. We're going to launch 3 products, 10 features each. We're going to take care of these 30. They're going to launch all at the same time. These other 2 products are going to be next year and then 18 months from now. And so breaking up that will help you create a product roadmap, and it will— it doesn't mean you always have to do it Spread out over a long time. It can be over a 12-month period, you release 20 products that cover everything that you need. It doesn't really matter. You just know that you can break it up. And that's something that's going to— that has happened to me in working on products. We're developing a product. We've even gone to where, hey, we have a product here. We could start adding all these features. Oh, customers are starting to ask for this feature and this feature and this feature. And about halfway through the development process, you go, okay, well, we have too many features. Like, people also want this to cost a certain amount. So we're going to keep these features here and we're going to make a second companion product. And the people that want these additional features, they're going to buy the second product and they're going to mix it in with the first product or going to connect them however they connect. And then they'll have all the features they want. But we're not going to make it so that the people who just want these features can't buy a product with just those features. And this is how you end up with different levels of products. And again, going back to a car analogy, that's how you have a base model with just the base features. Nobody wants anything super flashy. I remember back when power locks was an advanced feature in cars, so Your base model didn't have power anything, no power mirrors, no power locks, no power windows, and you could add those things. So you also want to think about, you know, back to the marketing part, who are you marketing to and what levels are they interested in? And that's where you can end up having these levels of product. Well, this product, it has 10 features and it does these 10 things and it's really great. These are the primary features, you know, everybody needs them. Car has tires, has steering wheel, has engine, has, has a frame, right? Has the basic features. It's still a car. And then you have this, these other 10 features that people want, but not everybody wants those. So that's a package. You can, you can add that in or not, up to you. And you can keep doing that. So you can end up having as part of your product strategy, not only separate products, but you can have add-on products and you can have variations of a product where you have— it's the same box, the same frame, whatever it is, it's the same, a lot of the same mechanical things that are all there, same body, and then you just make some upgrades to it. So think about that when you're doing features. And in order to avoid feature overload, maybe there is an overloaded— what might be considered an overloaded version that 10 people want, and great, you'll, you'll sell 10 of those. That's the most expensive. It has every single feature, bell and whistle that you could possibly ever think of. But you're going to sell mostly the base model. And so that's where you're going to put the absolute needed And most wanted features in that version, and then the rest can be an optional thing that you launch separate product or a variant of your product down the road, or at the same time, in order to cover everybody's needs for the different features that you are getting feedback on. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed and like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. 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