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?

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.

help by Dimitri N.

Earlier this week I had the misfortune of coming home to a flooding garage. It turns out my water heater was leaking. As part of the repair I turned off the gas and water for safety. I was at the point of turning it all back on and was befuddled by the help I was provided. It clearly wasn’t written for a layman.

Who needs your help?

The problem is that the people who understand jargon and complex contexts don’t need instructions. They can do this stuff in their sleep. Laymen like me need instructions. And the same is true for your application.

The people who need help on your site are lost, confused, and in need of soothing, practical, and readable advice.

Who writes your help?

There’s nothing wrong with industry jargon when used amongst others who speak it’s tongue – it’s a more succinct conversion for them. Jargon, when defined and used consistently can actually help an industry or vertical to mature as the collective group of people stand on common ground.

The problem is that it’s far too common to find help that was written within this jargon. While I’ll admit that this is the right place to introduce it, it’s not the right place to assume it’s already understood.

Simplifying help

Make help accessible to people who are new to your field or who may have been practicing in isolation. Don’t be afraid to use terms that are more common, or to provide asides that explain new concepts when they are introduced. It’s also a good idea to use alternative, friendly descriptions of objects to ensure that you are on the same page.

Here’s a good rule of thumb:

If a help topic read out loud to someone once is not understandable, and executable, then it is too complex.

I rewrote that line 4 times to reduce complexity and increase clarity. Because this whole blog post is a help topic, and you have to ensure readability of all help topics.

What next?

Here’s something we did in an industry group I worked on within the email community a little while back. We asked non-industry people, like your parents or friends outside of work, to review help and informational documents that we had created.

That made sure that it was something anyone could grasp, and we weren’t writing for experts who didn’t need help.

So keep in mind your target market and write some help that is actually helpful!

Recently I was discussing distractions at Argyle, well we were discussing a very specific distraction, but that’s all details. A popular piece of common wisdom popped into my head:

One of the hardest parts about startups isn’t deciding what to do next; often it’s deciding what not to do at all.

Weapon Of Mass Distraction

But it’s almost too easy to trot that excuse out and try to wholesale avoid any potentially dangerous distractions. The problem with lines like the one above is that they can cause you to miss out on a huge opportunity.

Twitter was a side project at Odeo. Hell, Starbucks started off selling beans and espresso makers, they had no interest in brewing coffee. Today’s distraction could be tomorrow’s billion dollar idea.

These things can run the gambit, some provide alternate revenue streams, some just augment and existing offering, and other change the business you’re in.

So how do you decide whether that distraction is a potential game changer? I’m just thinking out loud, but here are a few tools we’ve employed to mull things over:

Market check

Are there people willing to pay for this potential waste of time? If not, it doesn’t mean the idea is dead in the water, but it does mean that you have to be willing to get flexible when it comes to monetizing.

Whether or not this idea is out of the realm of your existing customer base, it’s still worth working through the details of profitability. Even easy wins have hard costs.

Product Alignment

Does this idea dovetail with your existing offering at all? It might not be that much of a distraction if you can upsell/cross sell it to your existing customers or prospects.

Or maybe it can help fill feature gaps or competitive shortfalls you may have with your existing products. Think creatively about how this could be leveraged.

Company Impact

Ideas can solidify into reality quite quickly in this cloud driven world. You can be sitting pretty with a shiny new toy in a matter of days. But how will the rest of the company deal with it?

Marketing needs to know how to talk about it and who to push it to. Sales needs to know how to talk pretty about it and how to handle the objections. And don’t get me started with support.

Know who will be impacted and how before you go too far down that road.

Vigorous Debate

One of my favorites – you can almost always count on me to play a bit of devil’s advocate. If you’re not sure what to do then talk it out. And don’t be afraid to drag in some heavy hitters – whether that be investors, advisors, mentors, customers, or random people on the street. Sometimes a little outside perspective is the best thing you can bring to this discussion.

Why are you even considering this?

This might be the most important point. Why in the world are you even having this discussion? Did a big prospect ask for something crazy? Did you just stumble across some sort of technical easy win? Have you stumbled across a treasure trove of slightly skewed leads or uncovered a new unmet market need?

Whatever the reason, you better understand the full motivation behind it or it could get very painful very quickly.

Decide

So should you grab that distraction by the tail and turn it into a money maker or let it go? I don’t know, you’re just going to have to make a decision and keep on truckin. That’s life in a startup.

Here’s to yet another interesting business challenge that’ll keep you up at night!

Recently I’ve been asked a few times how close I am to done with the major feature-set at Argyle. While the question is laughable to me (and Eric), to the layman it probably makes sense.

The best answer I could come up with was on a scale of 1 to infinity I was probably at about 8.5 million. I mean, that’s really far, we’ve got a good product. But it’s not really anywhere near infinity.

You see, the whole premise is laughable to us because we know that in this space you’re never done. Really, I’ve never worked on a software product that I thought could be done. If you can finish your piece of software then you are building a feature, not a product.

There’s always more features, more things to add, heck, more things to remove. That’s the curse and the joy of good software, you can always do something else to it.

Last week marked my last day at Bronto, while this week saw a kick off of my efforts in Argyle Social. Starting a fresh new company is quite a feat. I’ve never done this before, so I’m learning as I go.

I have a strong desire to build a prototype app – something we can start to play with, something we can start to show off, something we can start to get feedback on. All of those are extremely important as we strive to build something brand new, both in terms physically and conceptually new.

However, I’ve had to push back on that urge and get my thoughts in order. No small task given my love for hacking together a prototype. For those of you who’ve followed me for a little while, you may recall I threw the first iteration of idek.net together in a weekend.

So what have I been doing? Well, a good few years of product management have taught me that you can’t build a good product without a design. Also that you can’t build a good design without a conceptual model. Of course, none of this is possible at all without some goals.

Right now we have no product, no customers, really nothing but some great ideas, a lot of motivation, and some great goals. This week was spent revising those goals to ensure that we know what we are heading for and that we know what we want to reach.

So, yes, I’ve gotten more work done than just a boondoggle in the land of goals. But I know that the time and effort that Eric and I have spent on thinking through the fundamental needs of clients will pay off in spades. Delaying the launch of the first iteration of our app by a few days is definitely worth the price of improved focus and a better understanding of what will make us and our clients more successful.

Anyone who knows me can tell you that I do have a propensity to talk a lot. It’s who I am and what I do. But lately I’ve been given a few chances to do so to a bit of a wider audience.

Last weekend I spoke at the Product Camp unconference. This is a conference where there are no attendees, everyone is a participant. So at the suggestion of a product manager friend of mine, I offered to talk about Delivering Products in a Software as a Service (SaaS) World. As it turns out there was a bit of interest in this topic.

I really enjoyed the talk, it generated some good discusion. Not suprising, and in true unconference fashion, I learned quite a bit also during the talk. This was a great first experience in leading a discussion at a conference – and it was a lot of fun.

I’ve actually been invited to talk on a panel this August as well. I’ll be speaking alongside a colleague and friend, Mike Rundle at Social Media Fresh down in Charlotte. I was invited to speak there based off my experience of writing applications for social networks. This would be related to my work with idek.net and more recently pici.me.

So if you are interested in social media and how it can be a benefit to businesses – then please check out Social Media Fresh. And if you are coming then be sure to check out the Social Media Tech Panel.

Kipp Bodnar (@kbodnar32) over at DigitalCapitalism.com, links to a very inspiring and frank talk from Gary Vaynerchuck in a recent blog post. Let’s watch it here, it’s worth the 15 minutes…

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4[/video]

Kipp calls out what I also feel is the most important part of that talk: Be Yourself. Well Kipp actually goes a bit beyond that, his point is that if you are yourself and are not hyper-concerned with pleasing everyone then you will piss a few people off – and that’s good.

I’m not sure you have to piss people off, but I agree that you have to be willing to allow that to happen. Part of being yourself is being passionate about something. Being passionate lends to having very strong opinions and being able to stand up to others with differing strong opinions. And that’s where you provide value.

So where are you providing value? Who are you arguing with?

I’d ask you to forgive the lack of gusto exhibited here lately, but that’s something that blogs just can’t ask you to do. But I can at least explain why I haven’t been posting lately. There’s a simple explanation for this, Bronto has it’s Fall 2008 Release this weekend.

Is it a product manager’s job to test furiously? to write help docs? to give webcasts? to do a little coding? Well, it all depends on your level of dedication, and maybe a bit on your company too. But that’s one things I really like about Bronto, our dev team gets everyone involved in the process. We all work very hard to get a release out the door.

Being a product manager is about dedication and devotion to your product. You have to be excited about it, and you have to not just want, but ensure, that it is as good as it can be. Of course this isn’t just for PMs, it’s for anyone who can really get into their company. It’s for anyone that has passion for their work.

So for probably another week, I’ll still be hard at work, because I know this release will be a huge step forward for Bronto.