Anonymous
We had to decide whether or not to keep investing in, or sunset a feature that came out of a hackathon project. The feature itself was well-coded, and the design was created by a designer, and functionally it worked. However, it was built on an untested assumption that customers would actually get value from automating and thus losing some control over a fairly sensitive and infrequent workflow. That meant that the feature was launched as quickly as possible due to the hackathon nature, and (i) confused customers, as it wasn't in our public roadmap or well packaged in the app, and (ii) led to low adoption and thus no meaningful testing feedback to further develop the feature. While there were hypotheses that an adapted version of the feature could be more valuable (and verified during sales demos) for a new, larger customer segment - we decided to instead deprecate the feature as it was a distraction, and not a high impact investment at the time given other priorities.
Learning:
- Have a product person leading any new feature, so that there is a clear value hypothesis and alignment with GTM functions to launch and communicate the feature successfully to customers
- Do not assume that customers will want to adopt something just because they mention it
- Well coded, designed feature without a clear value prop is still without value
