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The Three Goals of a Product Feature
One of the product articles I reference often is the Guide to Product Planning: Three Feature Buckets written by Adam Nash. I love this article for the simple framework to think about building your product roadmap by focusing on elements of moving key metrics, building customer requests, and inspiring delight.
In a similar vein, I contend that any product feature can be tied to one of three goals. These goals can sometimes overlap, but more often a feature is optimized to improve a single one of these goals.
Get more people to use it
These are features that you believe will drive product growth — acquiring new users or helping existing users get onboarded and become activated.
Get people to use it more
Improve retention and engagement with the product by working on features that will get people to continue to use your product and come back more often.
Improve operating leverage
Make it easier to support, scale, or monetize the product now and into the future. This may include fixing bugs to reduce support volume, automating manual processes, resolving tech debt, or focusing on pricing and monetizing capabilities.
