Are you falling in the feature trap?

Sukanya Bharati
August 21, 2024
Blog
#founders, #productmanagement, #productmarketing, #productstrategy
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This is a trap that too many technical product leaders fall in.

Sometimes they overrule marketing.

They do so at their own peril.

Not long ago I worked with a company that had a successful product.

It had evolved over the years and done well.

Then some of the people came up with another product.

It was for a business audience, but based on technology. Complex algorithms, data science, AI, ML and more.

The techies in the team were really excited.

My “algo” is better than yours..

Every presentation, marketing campaign, collateral, website was moulded to that.

It was all about tech, all about features, all about capabilities.

But hardly anything about benefits.

The market pushed back.

Customers were not interested.

Sales slowed down.

Actually came to a standstill.

Budgets were increased. More campaigns were run.

Few leads came in, but hardly any conversions.

Finally the techies relented.

They had to accept that nobody cared about the algorithms.

Well they didn’t really admit it, but actually started talking about the benefits.