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No feature is unimportant. If it serves a purpose then it’s important to someone. And while those purposes may vary wildly, I have started to think about all of them in terms of two camps: Winning and Keeping.

Winning Features

Winning features are those that help you win a deal. They often times have the sizzle that gets people excited about what you’re doing and give you a leg up on the competition. These are the things that the sales guys get excited about and might just get you written up in techcrunch.

(Updated to include…) An example is eye popping reports, they often look great and seem to convey the info you need. However, after a month or so within an application you may find that they are lacking key information that make them truly functional. Now, it wasn’t the intent of the graph to not do a good enough job, but as is often the case, without a lot of careful thinking and planning, many graphs & reports fall short of providing truly actionable results.

Keeping Features

These are the trusty guys that keep churn down. Keeping features are the ones that sales usually doesn’t bother showing, but that makes the everyday user happy. These are things that people often don’t think of when they are buying, but within 1 week of using your product they couldn’t imagine a world without it.

(Updated to include…) An example here is general navigation and workflow. Getting yourself to the place that you use within the application most often may take 3 or 4 clicks. While this doesn’t seem like a big deal during a demo, after a few weeks of having to work your way in to your destination you’ll be wishing for a shortcut. It’s important to note here that calling out easy navigation probably won’t make a huge difference in a demo unless you are very good with positioning that statement.

They can’t be both?

No, I’m not saying that. I would never say that you should be building features that just get people in the door and are useless afterwards. It’s more about who you are appeasing. Winning features may still excite your existing customers, but they probably aren’t going to get the daily use that Keeping Features get.

There’s also the question of where they come from. Sales, competition, and innovation will usually drive the creation of Winning Features. Existing customers and support teams will usually drive the creation of keeping features.

and so?

Well, I’m not saying this is revolutionary. But recognizing that your features live in these two camps; that they have two masters – Sales and Churn Prevention – may help you to strike a better balance based on the stage of your company.

Also, being able to communicate goal bucket sizes for Winning vs Keeping may better help set expectations across the organization from quarter to quarter. It also helps you to ensure that you development team isn’t off in Winning land when you need them focusing on Keeping, or vice versa.

So, where do your current features land, Winning or Keeping?

So I just read the apology email from Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO), turns out it was a bait and switch. He wasn’t apologizing, he was doing more of the same, focusing on his needs at the expense of his customers.

He started out apologizing, but ended up slapping me in the face. Awesome. For those of you who didn’t get it, or haven’t read it, Reed does apologize, but then he announces that they will be splitting out the DVD and Streaming services into two companies. Here’s a recap on Wall Street Journal: Netflix Separates DVD and Streaming Services.

Focusing on their needs

This reeks of someone changing things to make their life easier. Netflix has a lot of confusion internally, and this helps them to remove that and focus better. That’s fine, I get that.

However, any good company will figure out how to eliminate internal problems without disrupting their customers. As a product manager, I’ve had to fight many battles where an internal team wanted to simplify their process at the expense of the customer’s experience.

All business changes need to be run through this filter: Does this improve the customer experience?

The pricing and company rodeo they’ve been running us through fails that test miserably.

People want more, not less

Look at Apple, they are offering more services in more areas (streaming media, better integrated products, etc), and people are eating it up. By removing the integration between streaming and dvds they are adding complication to customers’ lives and eroding their value.

Netflix should be looking at ways to provide further integration with other services and offerings that can leverage the data sets and customer base they have. This move embodies the “do one thing and do it well” mindset, which is admirable, but isn’t what is generally needed in the media world today.

I’m sure, as Netflix claims, the products will move faster now that they are becoming disentangled. But I don’t think that product problems have been their stumbling block, it’s been media and availability. This change seems to be more of a distraction for customers for than anything else.

What now?

Well, I’m not canceling my account now, but the bar to disrupt Netflix has just gotten lower. The biggest hurdle in this space is still content, getting the right amount of media available is key. But pure digital players no longer have a huge hurdle of physical media to overcome, and other players like RedBox, could consider getting into the streaming side with a huge advantage.

Will Netflix disappear because of this? probably not. Will they look back and rue the day they made the switch? Maybe. Will I end up on another service? I’m not sure, but the likelihood is higher now than ever.

For the longest time I didn’t think too much about Facebook Ads. It doesn’t take much to realize that they have amazing reach, but I had heard some discouraging numbers (and continue to hear actually) and didn’t think they were too relevant to B2B – which is often my concern.

Granted, CPC advertising isn’t what I do everyday, but I try to keep my head in the advertising game since it’s central to the products I build – and it helps keep Argyle going.

Recently I had a few minutes to ponder FB ads, and realized that they make perfect sense if you think about them like ads on TV. Here’s a quick run-down on why they are similar:

• The ads have little to do with the medium
• The audience is often passively engaged in the subject content
• The ads see little direct interaction (hence the discouraging numbers)

And here is why those are good things:

• The ads can be relevant to the viewers interests – FB targeting is fantastic
• The audience often doesn’t have a real purpose, so they can be distracted by ads more easily
• Lower interaction – yes, but awareness is valuable. That’s hard to measure, but most likely occuring

So even though I have heard a number of anecdotal stories of low performance campaigns for FB ads, I think the targeting and audience that it has is compelling. As a tool to bring awareness to a very specific audience when their mind isn’t busy working too hard on other things, it excels.

I’m a convert, Facebook is definitely a powerhouse mass media advertising platform, and I want to be there more than ever.

I’ve worked on product pricing more times than I’d like to recall. It’s a tricky business, you have to balance value, cost, perception, competitors, market factors, marketing, and many other considerations. In short, it’s a pain, and it’s not easy.

But pricing is very important to your business. It can not only give you an edge in the market, but it can also help define who you are in the minds of your customers.

But most importantly, Pricing helps to define value in the eyes of your customers

Don’t get me wrong, you can’t dictate value. But pricing specific add-ons, features, or services at a premium can have a very real impact on how people perceive the worth of those items.

Netflix’s most recent move to price streaming separate from DVD-at-home was smart (see their blog post). It was clear that they were leaving a lot of money on the table. It’s also clear that they felt that they were undervaluing their DVD-at-home service.

(Side note, being a long time Netflix customer, I always thought they were undervaluing streaming. Their blog post reveals that their internal view was actually flipped from mine; they saw the DVD as an add-on to a streaming service.)

Pricing changes aren’t something new to Netflix, their world is moving fast and they’ve had to shift things around a few times to keep prices in line. And this recent change will probably be followed by a few more.

Now bring into the mix that fact that Amazon has started to get more seriously into the streaming movie market. Now we can expect some fierce battles shaking out in this arena – there’s a lot of money to be made in movies at home.

So this brings me back to where I started – with pricing establishing value. This move is strategic in that it allows Netflix to clearly look at their streaming service as it’s own viable product with distinct profits and costs.

This will allow them to better measure, manage, and grow their streaming offering as the market heats. In the end, we can only hope that that will provide more value for all of us.

I’m a firm believer that you have to enjoy what you do. I do what I can to help keep that going at Argyle, but I’d like to think that I can have a bit more reach than that.

That’s why I love it when Josh inserts a bit of humor into our app. Many of our users have commented on some of the funny error messages we throw from time to time.

We’re not afraid to let people know right away that we have a sense of humor, it’s even in our Getting Started tool:

That’s why I was quite happy to see this tweet today from James Avery over at Adzerk:

It’s always nice when I know we made some one chuckle while they were work.

Btw, if you are wondering what made him giggle, here’s the little guy we inserted when you have a bit of a problem with your password:

And don’t worry, these aren’t all the little easter eggs, we’re always on the lookout for more ways to amaze and amuse.