Product Enhancement Strategies: How to Add Value Without Adding Bloat

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are the Develop-a-Nor podcast. We are Building Better Developers. I am Rob Brodhead, happy to be one of the founders of Develop-a-Nor, Building Better Developers as well. I am also a founder of RB Consulting, where we help you do technology better. It's basically one of those things where technology is expensive. It is in a lot of places, probably your second or third biggest cost in your business. Number one is almost always going to be your people. Even if it's yourself, it's most likely going to be people. But then technology tends to be right behind it because, yes, it is, I'm sort of grouping it in a big way, but it is because you may have technology is going to do things like help your back office, help your front office, help your customer relationships. It's going to help your employee relationships. It's going to help you fill out all the paperwork that you need to for come tax time and all that kind of stuff. So we help you through simplification, automation, integration, innovation. We sit down, we make sure that we're clear on what your business is and what your special offerings are. And then we look at our experience in technology and building teams and building solutions and find the best way, whether it's building something for you, buying it off a shelf, maybe making even just a little adjustments to what you have. Sometimes it may be as simple as here's a piece of paper and a pencil. And if you guys just keep track of this in a columnar format, it's going to be a better approach. However, that is that's what we provide. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing. So this morning I was like, you know what, I need to go find a place. I want to park. I want to have some nice internet. I'm maybe going to have a little, you know, have some tea, have a breakfast. Not in my office. My office is like in flux right now. So there's a great little place. And I'm like, oh, cool. And they've got some good food. And so I walk in and Michael is smirking because he knows you guys in video, I guess, are the ones that see it. If you're audio, you don't because he knows that one of the things I complained about is I walk in and I'm like the coffee hits my nose. But then the next thing is a lady playing music right there at the door. And this is like one of their offerings. This is a service that they provide in their business is that they have live music there on a Saturday morning, which is when I walked in and I was like, oh, good. I'm going to walk right back out because I don't need somebody that loud while I'm trying to enjoy my breakfast and my tea. That being said, you do want to go enjoy Michael, who's going to introduce himself. That's a really bad like segue, but I work on that. It's it's too early in the morning. Introduce yourself, mister. Thanks, Rob. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Mollage, one of the co-founders of developer NERV building better developers. And I'm also the founder of a company called Envision QA, where we are a small software company that helps businesses, clinicians, whoever in their search for better software to help them grow and build their business. We work with doctors offices. We work with small businesses. And what we do is we come in and we help you assess what you currently have, what software you're currently using for your business and what your business really needs. We embed ourselves within your processes. We understand all the ins and outs of your business. And then we do a full assessment of your software stack to determine is the software working for you or are you working for your software? Meaning, are you spending more time trying to make the software work for you? Whereas you should be able to either build or buy something that is going to save you time and money. So that's one of the biggest services we offer, along with building software for companies or helping software that have software that they need support with. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing, bad thing. So good thing. It is spring. My wife is starting to build out her garden for the year and I bought her a nice little yard cart so she could move things around a little bit bigger than a little, little red wagons. Bad thing, FedEx ran over it the other day when they pulled into the yard, along with hitting the big pile of bags of dirt and that, that we had sitting there. Oh my gosh. So for my wife, that was a very bad thing. And for my pocketbook, it was a very bad thing because I had to go buy another one immediately and get it overnighted so that she could have it to put all those piles of dirt where it needed to go. So it's spring is here and it's good and bad. That reminds me, I guess, of the home alone where they would always like, you know, the train, the van or the bus or taxi or whatever come in and they hit that, that little, you know, statuette or whatever every time and knock it over and then have to like set it back up. Oh gosh. At least it wasn't you. I have, I've had a couple of those times where I've destroyed something because it was closer to my car than I thought. And yes, that, that was your good thing is it was not your fault. So I want to talk about, it's essentially expanding your product. Think about enhancing it or however you look at it, whether it's a product or a service. And there's really a couple of ways you can go about it. Either you can take your existing service, your existing product, and you can add features to it. Think about it from a like a old school desktop application or even a web application. Maybe what you do is you're adding some features that are essentially other menu options that a user will have or modules or plugins that a user will have. When you think of like, I go back to CRM can be very basic. It could be, you know, customer address and a customer history. Well, maybe you want to add on a like an email campaign or an integration to somebody like a like a MailChimp or something like that. Or maybe you want to add some reports. Those would that's those are kinds of things I'm talking about in a service area. It may be things like you want to maybe you want to expand the services that you offer. Maybe you were previously only doing the same front end web work. And now you want to actually add that you're also going to do some of the middle tier work or the back end web. A lot of times that would probably make sense is that maybe your front end developer and you are now going to start adding the back end so that it can talk to your front end. The thing about these is that there's there as there isn't so many things, there is a consideration as far as what is it? What is the impact of doing this? Now, part of it is the customer side. And that honestly is the most important is where am I adding value to the customer? And that's that is such a critical question, because I think too often we don't think about that. We do something that is cool or neat or something that we want to do. And now we've just added bloat. We haven't really added something that is useful to the customer. Sometimes we actually detract from it. I think of now because I'm just not a fan of it. If you go to a lot of the office products, the words and the Excel's and things like that, there's you know, there's menus upon menus upon menus. And there's a lot of stuff that it does. But if you just want to do basic stuff, it's it's just too much. It takes too long to figure it out. I want you know, I want to be able to go to these these things and just go bam, bam, bam. I can find them. I can save it. I can load it, whatever it is, and then move on. I don't need all of those other features. And so that, I think, is one of the things that you want to think about is, does my product need to be enhanced, improved, upgraded? Because sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you can just keep doing that. And maybe it's just a little bit of doing it better what you did. So you're not providing anything actually necessarily extra to it. It's the same service or the same product. It's just of a higher quality. It doesn't fail as often. Or maybe it's a little faster or something like that. You know, performance tweaks and stuff like that can in themselves be a very big benefit for a product, particularly because this is one that I've dealt with a lot. If you're doing data migrations and data moving and things like that or large data sets, sometimes those can take hours and even days. And if you can build something that does that faster, then now you're saving hours or even days. So I think the first thing is. One, I guess it's now this is one of those little chicken and egg kind of thing. The first one is, is this valuable to the customer? Is this something where you're using your product, you're providing your service and you've gotten feedback because this is talking about existing products. So you should have feedback or have conversations with your customers that provide you with this information that says, hey, it would be beneficial if you did X or if you did it this way, or if you, if we had this thing that we could work with as well within your product, those are the kinds of things that you need. And then the next side of it is. Am I essentially am I positioned to do this? Because sometimes adding or growing adds different stuff. Like, for example, if you're building a team, every time you add another person, that's another set of potential points of failure for communication. If you know, two people talking together, it's just back and forth. Now, if you got three people, then, you know, A has to talk to B and C correctly, but B and C often. And then as you grow, obviously it grows in complexity. That can be the same thing with our products as we grow into another add another feature or enhancement, or even in a parallel thing, maybe we say, well, we have this product offering, but now we're going to offer a second product that maybe it works with ours. Maybe it doesn't. But what we've also done is we've expanded quite likely our customer pool or our ideal customer base. Are we positioned to do so? Because sometimes we step into this stuff too soon and we haven't essentially we haven't firmed up our position where we're at. And instead we step into this new thing thinking, well, we're going to expand, but we expand too fast. And the next thing you know, it all comes crumbling down because we haven't built a good enough foundation. Thoughts on that, Michael? Yeah, so it's interesting that last one, especially because when you are growing your business and you are expanding, especially with software, one of the biggest things we like to do, especially with the agile is fail fast, like make changes quickly to your product or to your environment, get the software out there, find out the users like it or not, and then roll it back if they don't. You're in a constant state of flux. But if you have a specific product out there, like say Microsoft Word, you're not going to want to be making fast tweaks to it and having it fail. It's an established product. So if your product is something out there that's established, you don't want to break it. You don't want to make it unstable. So that's one of the biggest things you've got to be careful of when you're looking to expand or grow or enhance your products or even offer a secondary product. Because the other thing, it's almost like baking. And this just comes to mind because my wife's been watching the tournament of champions or whatever it is on Food Network right now. But nine out of ten times your customer is happy with one product. If you give them one product, you give them a solid product. You give them two products. If they are competing products, they're going to compare the two. And if they both are not solid products, they're going to look at one and say, well, this is great, but this is crap. So why should I buy the great one if you're providing crap here? Is this one really crap behind the scenes? So one of the things you have to be cautious of as you expand services, as you grow the product, is to make sure that you keep the same level of quality across your service line. You want to make sure that everything you provide meets the same standards that you've been providing your customers from the beginning. You don't want to give them something new that's now subpar. Now, oh, sorry, I just in your mute. I just want to say that is that is a very key thing from a quality perspective is that when you grow and we talked about this with when we hire as well, is that when you grow, then it can be more difficult to do the high quality processes that you need to do because there is a there is a cost to doing so. And you may not be able to expand that. So I just sorry, I wanted to jump into that even though I was had muted myself. Sure. So that was the first thing I wanted to touch on. So the second thing is you may have an established product, you may have an established software service. One of the things over time is the quality of life of your product might be degrading. Now, in the last episode, we talked about product placement, we talked about products and things like that. But over time, especially in the digital world, you know, you're going to have to have over time, especially in the digital arena, we can write software that lasts for decades. As long as the operating system or the environment that it's on is stable, that software pretty much runs forever, either until the computer dies or we just can't load the software anymore on a system that essentially falls under what's called the quality of life or end of life of a product. How long can your product live? One of the interesting tweaks, and this is from a product enhancement perspective, is is there something you can do to constantly tweak your software to improve its quality of life by either speeding it up, improving processes, just take what you have and make it better for your end users. Now, to do that, Rob touched on this, but talk to your customers, do like quarterly questionnaires or surveys or, hey, let me take you out for coffee and sit down and just talk to you about your business. Is this product still working for you? How are you using it? You know, are there things missing from this application or software that we could add to it that could improve your life? Now, with that last little bit, there is a catch 22 with that. If you have a large customer base and you talk to two or three of your customers and they say, hey, this would be a really great feature to add to your product. But if you do not kind of check with all your customer bases, you may put something into your product that turns off 90% of your user base. And now suddenly your project is failing. It's losing customers. Your quality is down the tubes. So be very careful when you are looking to enhance the products that you do a large kind of query of your customers to make sure that what you're adding makes sense from a business perspective and a user flow of the software. Because if you put something in there that now requires two additional clicks to do something, you've just slowed your customer down and they're not going to like that. And like Rob mentioned, especially with the office products, all those buttons and things up there are nice features to have. But for someone that just wants like a notepad, they're not going to use word. They're not going to use that product or they're going to look at it and be like, Oh, this is too complicated. And they're going to go somewhere else. So you kind of need to put on your customer goggles, your user goggles, and re-evaluate your products, your services from the customer perspective and make sure that what you are providing really meets the value of the customer live in their shoes, understand what it is that they need. Don't just say, Hey, this is a cool bell and whistle. It will improve my product. And at the end of the day, it doesn't. It actually detracts from your product. So again, it's kind of quality control in a sense, but it's also customer feedback, get engaged with your customer because if you don't, what you're building really is in a silo and it may be great or it may be trash. So be very careful with how you spend your time and how you interact with your customers. You don't want to sour the pool if you already have a good customer base. And I think you always need to have that good cross-section of customers and feedback. Most in most situations, you're going to have like one or two or three or some small number of golden customers that they are. They use your product a lot. They understand that usage, they understand their business and they have very and they're open to they're very driven to give you feedback and to help work with your customers. And a lot of this is going to be in a relationship you foster with them. So there's this open line of communication because those are really the people that are your your driving force or the boots on the ground. People, the people that run this thing, use this thing day in and day out. A lot of times the check signer, for example, like let's say that's a CEO. You've got a product that it's at a company level that you the CEO has got to buy in on it. He's got a she's got a sign on the dotted line for that product to be sold. However, that doesn't mean that that's the person that should drive the product necessarily. What you probably want to do is get to the people that are using that product, talk to them and let them push that information up. Now, you can you can approach sales in a lot of different ways and things like that. But this is where you don't want to be using a product that like, let's say it's a help software that you sell and you're in a lunch with the CEO of the company of your biggest customer. And the CEO offers like a couple of suggestions that, yeah, it'd be nice if the product did this or did that or did this other thing. That doesn't mean that those they might be that may be a CEO that is very in tune and in touch with and as their finger on the pulse of their people or maybe not. So you take those and then you go talk to said people and say, hey, would this help you? Would this be useful? What if we provided this feature? Because that is a great way to while it's nice to have open ended feedback from them, this is something to really test out those specific deals, as Michael is alluding to, is where it's really it's like, what is it that you're thinking to do to enhance or improve or, you know, add another product? And then is that specific thing? Is it useful? Is it valuable? Is it something that your your existing customer base wants? And then I guess there is the other opportunity to say, well, actually, what I want to do is take my product that is for some sort of product customers and now create it in a whole different realm and a whole new set of customers. That is a different ball of wax basically to deal with, because now you're you're having to almost start from scratch at that point. Yes, you can lean on existing customers and we are we've satisfied our customers and, you know, maybe it is things like customer service and happiness and things like that are are high for our what we provide. And now we're going to provide this to you in this different industry. So it could be, you know, for example, if you have something that is used by, you know, milk cow farmers and you've suddenly been able to find a way to take that and transition transition that over to formula and racer teams only for you. But there's not going to be any real crossover for your customers. So you have to figure out how you want to do that. You have to build those relationships and see if that is truly helpful to them or not. Your challenge this time is. What is your next enhancement for your product? Think about it and maybe you're right in the middle once, so maybe it's very easy. But if not, if you're or maybe if you're almost to the end of version one or version two or a release, what is going to be the next step? And these are things that I think are very helpful as you particularly as you're getting close to the end of completing a project or a version of a product. Is that you can. It helps you avoid the we need to stuff this into this product, I will call it where it's it's one of the things just like, well, if we don't fix this now, if we don't add this now, then it's going to be too long and we don't want the customers to have to wait for this. We're going to do it or maybe we don't even know how, but if you know that that's going to be in the next product in the next version, then you say, you know what, this it makes a lot of sense for us to not tackle it right now so that instead we can do it cleanly and better in the product ahead. But it is also something maybe this is a time where even though there's are some features that maybe you feel are very valuable and your customers feel are very valuable, maybe instead you step back and say, you know, but our stuff is dog slow. We need to like, we need to figure out a way to, you know, maybe or maybe there's a lot of bugs. So maybe we need a bug fix release where we really just focus on squashing bugs and improving quality, or maybe it's one where it's. We do a performance tuning release where it's like, we want to do it, you know, better, faster, smaller, things like that. That's the challenge for you this time around is like, where is your next improvement step going to be? Where's it going to come from? For us, our next step is always getting an email from you. If we get an email from you, that helps us. This is that customer feedback. You are our customers. We want to hear from you, the boots on the ground people that are out there, info at developer.com. Tell us what you like, what you don't like. What are some suggestions maybe you have? What have you liked in the past? Or what would you like us to spend more time on? What would you like us to spend less time on? Even format, if there's something like, you know, I wish you guys could change this around. I would love for you guys to do a 24 hour long podcast. Okay. Probably not going to make it that way. And you would not enjoy that, but things like that, like any feedback is welcome. We'd love to hear it. Cause you are the reason we are here. For the rest of this, I'm just going to say you need to now be the reason you're here in your life and got there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a newer podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just the little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.