from Features to Value Proposition
One thing I love about software is that there are very few limits to what you can do. Basically if you can imagine it, it can be done. After all it is all ones-and-zeros. One implication of this is that it is easy to think up new features for a software product. What developer hasn’t dreamed up an idea for making VS better or some new API for the framework? But features in and of themselves don’t make for a great product. What is important in planning great products is not the features, it is the value proposition that the features enables, and consequently this is the really the hard work for planning.
After mulling this over for a while yesterday, I decided to search the large percentage of the world’s knowledge that is embodied in the web and I stumbled upon these two definitions:
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contain something as important element: to have or present somebody or something as an important element of something |
statement of business strategy: a statement of the way a business proposes to use its resources to deliver superior value to its customers |
What I think is cool here is that a feature is necessarily a part of something bigger… it in and of itself is not the end goal. While a value proposition is about the end value we deliver to our customers. I wonder how software products would be different if we focused more on the value propositions we enable rather then the next cool feature.
Comments
- Anonymous
November 16, 2005
Right on. Developers I work with always look at me weird when I tell them this, because 1) I'm a supergeek who thinks that "technical preview" means new and "beta 2" means old news and 2) they think the focus should be on the product, not the solution.
Thanks for this entry, I'm going to forward it all over the department with my own commentary. This will be a great way to bring the topic up! - Anonymous
November 16, 2005
that's where i think Microsoft has always succedeed, they have always delivered value proposition, and other OSes deliver maybe many more features, but with no value proposition - Anonymous
November 21, 2005
You should be careful saying things like this in public! The next thing you know you'll wake up on a product management team--and you know what that means...:-)