Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.
Three customers are at risk today. You don’t have a feature they want and your sales team is concerned they will switch to your competitor’s product who does have the requested feature. What do you do?
You’ve done your homework. You know that many of these customers want these features but that in practice they rarely get used. There is a lot of perceived value, but not much actual value.
On top of that, it doesn’t really fit well into your overall product strategy. In fact, it breaks your product’s metaphor pretty significantly. You are worried it will do more harm than good.
But can you ignore three at-risk customers?
There are a lot of questions you can ask yourself to assess this situation. Are these three customers in your ideal customer segment? Are they really threatening to leave? Do you believe they will act on that threat? Is there another way you can provide the same perceived value without disrupting the metaphor of your current product?
These are all great questions. But for today’s post, I want to focus on a different one. How can you make this decision without getting caught up in the emotion of it?
With three customers at risk, any number of emotions may be influencing your ability to make the decision: fear, frustration, maybe even anger. Loss aversion is certainly at play. So how do you make a good decision?
In Decisive the Heath brothers, introduce a great tool, 10/10/10, for helping you to gain distance from an emotional decision. Suppose you did decide to build this feature. Ask yourself:
- How will you feel about this decision in 10 minutes?
- How about 10 months from now?
- How about 10 years from now?
With the first question you might realize that you are stubbornly resisting because you didn’t think of the idea and that it’s not actually that harmful. That it does in fact create value for the customer.
Or maybe the questions will reinforce your resistance. 10 months out, sacrificing three customers might be the right answer, if it means you have a truly differentiated product.
The 10 year time frame is a great one for really getting at what’s going to matter over the long haul. Too often we sweat the details that seem so important in the moment that in the long run are truly insignificant.
The next time you have a tough decision to make, invoke the 10/10/10 rule to gain some distance and not get caught up in the emotions of the decision.
Have you used the 10/10/10 rule? How did it help? Please share in the comments.
This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.
