Scott Belsky argues you should cut half your product's features to strengthen what matters. When Behance removed 'tip exchange' and 'groups', project publishing jumped. His rule: one feature in, one feature out.
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You should only do half of what you want to do. I think is one of those other kind of matrix style realizations that you probably learned the hard way. After cultivating products for many years, Behance, when we launched was a much more complicated product. We had this thing called groups. We had a tip exchange where creatives would come and share tips with each other. We had a work in progress capability where people could share snapshots of work in progress. We had all these features and if I were to be honest, I was probably just trying to hedge ourselves. I didn't know what thing would take off. And so we kind of launched V1 with so many things. And then what we realized is that when we started to kill a few of those things, we killed tip exchange. Suddenly engagement on project publishing went up. I was like, oh, let's try that again, let's kill groups. And lo and behold, engagement on project creation went up. And so the key KPIs were served ultimately when we were reducing the scope of the product. And since then I've been very insistent with the products I've been a part of and also advising over the years to just kind of like really be very cynical about every additional tab and every additional feature. Even have this notion of one feature in, one feature out. If you're looking at the roadmap, don't only compare things on the roadmap to be in the product. Also compare them to things that are already in the product. And sometimes consider taking something out of the product. Once you put something new in the product is again another thing that a lot of product leaders sort of learn the hard way. This notion of half of the options, half the tabs, half the offerings, it sort of compounds your chance a product market fit. And I love the analogy of the bonsai cultivation practice where every sort of brand new beautiful bud cut strengthens the trunk. And it's hard to kill these new things, especially those of us who are founders who get really excited about innovation and new capabilities.
