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Lesson on launching new features

There's quite a bit of chatter online the last few weeks regarding Netflix's decision to first kill, then revive, a little-used, cumbersome feature of it's service called "Profiles". I'm not a Netflix subscriber (I actually use Blockbuster's mail service), but this story is one that made me stop and think about the way we consider and commit to web projects here at ETC.

The story goes like this:

Some time ago, Netflix added a "Profiles" feature to their website, which was essentially an advanced way for users to manage their queues. At some point - presumably based on feedback from their users - Netflix decided this feature was a bust, and decided to kill it. They wrote about their decision on their community blog:
http://blog.netflix.com/2008/06/profiles-feature-going-away.html

Well, the outcry among the users that actually used this feature was fairly immediate and fairly noisy. And, less than two weeks after they took the feature away, Neflix added "Profiles" back. They wrote about their decision to reverse their previous decision:
http://blog.netflix.com/2008/06/profiles-feature-not-going-away.html

Once again, since I'm not a Netflix user, I don't have an opinion on the usefulness of the feature in question, nor on whether or not the folks at Netflix handled the PR of this well. It's just a really clear anecdotal lesson on thinking through features before you decide to build them, and thinking through (your commitment to) those features even more before you decide to launch them. Once you've made your investment, and especially once users have made theirs, there's a marriage in place and the separation costs aren't likely to be inconsequential.

I've probably not followed this guideline in the past on websites I've worked on, and will conceivably make the same conscious decision to ignore it again in the future on etcconnect.com or some other site. But, as they say about rules, you have to know them before you can break them.

Thanks for the refresher, Netflix!

Published Wednesday, July 02, 2008 12:19 PM by john.kuehl
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Comments

# re: Lesson on launching new features

Man - nothing like reading a post from a product manager to make me relate to the pain of having to make these decisions! I am a Netflix user and do not know about the feature!

My question is - does removing a feature make it easier for some users to use a product? We discuss this all the time in product management. Does the removal of features improve the experience for the non-power-user?

I do not have the naswer. But - I use Netflix and have NEVER been bothered by the profiles feature. I am now going to their site to learn what it is. I betcha I adopt to using it!

David Lincecum

Wednesday, July 02, 2008 2:07 PM by dlincecum

# re: Lesson on launching new features

It also makes me, as and end user, is it worth the manufacturer's time and energy to develop a feature that only 5% of the users (be they power or otherwise) will use?  Is that a good use of my resources?  And if I implement the feature, but it does not work exactly right, or as expected, will removing that feature tick more people off than just leaving it in?

I looked at the profiles feature and found it wasn't for me, but I was not all that surprised that I got the email from them saying that they weren't taking it away a couple of weeks after they were....

Wednesday, July 02, 2008 6:40 PM by Jeff Mabray

# re: Lesson on launching new features

Good points, Jeff. Even though there is a ton of talk in the business/marketing world today about not trying to be everything to everyone, isn't it amazing how powerful of a force that impossible goal of pleasing 100% of people can be?

In this case, I don't know which decision was more right - to remove, or to keep. That they flip-flopped probably shows that they don't know which group of users they want to most please. Is it the power user or novice user, or some other defined segment? The question to ask probably isn't solely, "which features should we develop/kill?", but rather, "which is the group we HAVE to please, and what do they need, and which of those needs can we effectively meet?"

Answering those questions together would put you in the position of not just potentially disappointing some of your users, but knowing ahead of time that you might disappoint them, and at the very least, being able to explain your reasoning for doing what you did anyway.

Now I'm sounding like I think I know it all. I don't...

Thursday, July 03, 2008 10:31 AM by john.kuehl
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