Questions

I have a marketplace that was soft launched a few months ago. The first version is to release "sell products" feature and the second version is to release "sell services" feature. The "sell products" feature wasn't done right b.c. it was a result of a pivot and we are currently at a funny angle. I'm currently focusing my energy on customer development of "sell service", and it's not ready for development yet. I feel like the "sell service" feature has a bigger market, market that I'm more familiar with and it's more exciting. Now my questions are: - Should I put the "Sell Products" feature to the side for now? If so, do I need to keep this features live? Would it demoralize my team mentality if I hid the current features, and start from a landing page of "Sell Service"? - Otherwise, should my team fix the "Sell products" feature (It's ready for development) while I'm doing the customer development of "Sell Services" feature? However, my resources are very very limited. Is there any rule of thumb I can follow? - How do I do a proper launch and the prep work so I can launch "sell services" feature better this time?

There's a few questions in your question.

1) Should you remove a feature if you know the other one is the right direction (and it'll be a departure from what you're offering right now)?

If it's hurting the customer experience, and doesn't work - then yes, take it out. If you don't think it will live on in the future, it's best to remove it and avoid confusing or frustrating new customers.

2) How do you avoid creating/shipping a half ass feature?

Well the good news is that you're probably the issue. The best way to nail a feature to ensure it's awesome is to spend the time up front iterating around different ways to solve it, usually in wireframes or mockups, and then prototyping using some app like Balsamiq (click-eable prototypes) or https://www.flinto.com/.

Ensure you get real copy, and user persona's with real data to play with and test the flows and all aspects of the user experience. If you spend the time up front developing these, then the engineers will work better and can't mix up what you're asking them to build.

So yeah, learn as much as you can about product management & marketing, and that should fix the issues.

P.S. These folks are geniuses when it comes to this
https://new.clarity.fm/sethberman/expertise/product-marketing
https://new.clarity.fm/cherylyeoh/expertise/branding-pr-product-marketing
https://new.clarity.fm/georgeishii/expertise/product-management

Hope that helps.


Answered 10 years ago

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