When new features complement existing ones

Always keep in mind ways you can improve adoption of existing features as you release new ones

I suppose it is both a good and bad thing that features that have previously been released are never finished. In this post, I want to share one of the ways in which it is a great thing.

At the core, the responsibility of the PM is planning. As you plan for features that are going to be developed 1-2 quarters from now, you can (or should!) see how features overlap and how the dots will connect. Said another way, you can predict how your users might want to interact with both the new feature and the already released one together! I use the word “predict” here cautiously, because one could argue you should already have a good pulse on how users would want to use the features together. This is because understanding use cases is so important in ensuring solid feature adoption.

There are huge benefits to building out features that work well together. For one, it’s a chance to improve adoption & engagement. Feature A, which was released 3 months ago — even if it has been wildly successful by most metrics — wasn’t adopted by a subset of users for one reason or another. Perhaps the value propositions didn’t hit home with them the way they did with others. Or maybe the workflow involving the feature just didn’t match how their firm operates (i.e. maybe a firm does most of their work from a specific module of your webapp, and Feature A is most accessible via a separate module).

Now Feature B comes along, and it happens to make Feature A even more appealing. It could be that it’s now easier to get started (the start is what stops most people). Maybe there is a user in the firm who more closely resonates with Feature B, so marketing Feature A to them is a no-brainer! While not always the case, rolling out complementary functionality could also present a revenue opportunity via add-ons or up-selling. This will of course depend on the pricing structure of your product.

The big takeaway of this post is to continuously keep in mind how you can improve adoption and engagement of existing features as you release new ones. A colleague of mine recently thought of a way that an existing feature could be marketed via new (somewhat unrelated) functionality we released. There was a brand new use case to talk about on CS calls and webinars. Even if features at face value seem unrelated, speaking with customers and performing surveys can quickly indicate otherwise. You learn about what users do in the product and when they do it. You then learn about what else they might want to do in the same motion!

I think it’s important as a PM to never be satisfied with the adoption of features. There is always an untapped market of customers that is not yet using it, and for existing customers who are already adopters, there is always a way to make the feature a) more closely match their workflow and b) provide additional value to them.