The Exchanges

Q I'm sorry, what do you mean by dogfooding?

A You work at a restaurant, you make food, you taste your own food, and you want to eat your own food. Dogfooding is the concept of everyone has to use your own product. You need to understand the pain points of the, uh, software you're developing. Right. Um, and, and so likewise, if you're never your own customer, you don't know what your customer's going through. You don't know what your customer's journey is. Um, and I, I've literally gone into situations where I've sat in rooms with, uh, executives or product folks. We've said, okay, well, where do you do this on your site? And they don't know. They can't find it. Uh, and, and often it's like the QA person who, who is, Has to be their own customer, because that's their job. He's like, oh, you go, you click here, and then you go through here, and then you go in this menu, you know. If you really think about that, that's a little bit ridiculous. You're very out of touch if that's the case. And so how are you possibly going to know, uh, again, if that idea that you're coming up with in that room is going to pass that litmus test of, do you actually need this thing? Um, if you don't even know where the things you've built are.

AI assessment note: “Dogfooding is the concept of everyone has to use your own product.”

Q useless crap and then throws it out there and then suddenly cuts it after they've got, you know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people using it. Nobody really liked it. They were just kind of using it. I don't know why they were using it. And then out of nowhere, sorry, we're going to cut it and you know, bye. How does a company do it better?

A I always lean on data. Uh, when there's a feature like that, you're almost always going to find that it's not really being used, right? You have a 100,000 customers, 10 use it. They might use it religiously, daily, eight times a day. Um, but then, too, also talking through that, the fact that those 10 or a hundred people use it religiously might at least increase the cost and maintenance of it, or the level of complaint if things go wrong with it. Um, so there's, there's kind of a data journey there that usually We take a client on. As far as convincing the customer, um, it's really about pointing the customer back to the core experience, and I'll be frank, it's not going to work a hundred percent. We like to put it as a feature trade-off, and we try to make a weighted trade-off, is what we call it. So, on the one hand, you're losing this thing that you love every day. On the other hand, We're going to announce that the same time that we're adding this other thing that hopefully is highly desirable, which softens the blow of losing that feature. At the end of the day, though, you might have those hundred customers run. Now, If those hundred customers are making up in some weird business model you have, 80% of your business, then that is a core feature, right? That is a core feature. However, if they're more likely, if you have a 100,000 customers and this is less than a hundred…

AI assessment note: “We like to put it as a feature trade-off, and we try to make a weighted trade-off”

Q You were talking about how you would advise a Client to have another feature ready to announce when getting ready to cut the feature that people are probably not using that much, but there are some that are holdouts. What if that company doesn't have another idea? What if they don't have another feature ready? What do you do then?

A I use the term feature loosely. It's really about having something to announce with your hit list, right? And so if you orchestrate this well, Um, most companies adjust at least several things in a year. Most businesses do not just run statically for, you know, years on end. So maybe you're gonna adjust pricing. Hopefully it's not a raise in pricing. You're gonna add free shipping. You're gonna something, some cookie, some, some little bit of something that you're changing that is a positive thing to give to, uh, the customer. And then you offset that with the hit list, right? And so what you're really trying to telegraph to the customer, which is true, you are removing A, B, and C, and you're getting X. And X doesn't have to be some full-blown feature. X could be, hey, if we get rid of A, B, and C, we can make X a dollar cheaper. Might not seem like a lot, but maybe you pay us a monthly membership and a dollar is a lot. And You can probably do that if you're not maintaining A, B, and C. I, you know, we're making up a circumstance here, but again, the idea is to look at what, what is the offset you can offer? And we kind of try to look at it in the opposite mean when you're going to have positive things, right? Many customers come to us with, we need to make a bunch of changes. Some are going to be positive. And when you're done talking to us, some might be negative, at least t…

AI assessment note: “I use the term feature loosely. It's really about having something to announce”

Q are going well and cut out the things that don't go well and Try to figure out as quickly as possible how to know if this thing is not going to work out or not. But what if you have a core business and that business is doing crazy good? At what point should a company decide whether or not to move laterally or to move into a new vertical?

A We, we tend to often hear the mythology and the legend of the companies that took big swings in a different direction. The story that I like to lean back on is the story of Amazon. Lots of people look at Amazon and they say, well, you know, they, they were a book Store, and now they do everything, and they have AWS and everything else. All of that change happens incredibly incrementally, making little shifts in each direction, even going back to an email Jeff Bezos sent to his valued users, basically saying, hey, ok, you buy books through us, what else Do you wish you could buy through us? And those were the things they went out and facilitated. They didn't just go and say, we're going to offer every product. They didn't, you know, AWS was developed out of a need to have better You know, hosting and infrastructure and uptime and things like that as their site was growing, right? They needed to take over more of these things. And then they realized like, we're doing these things. We could do these for others. There's kind of a natural progression and lean towards these things. And I feel like if, if you're lost there and you're not really sure what the next step is to then go back to the data. And if you don't have the data, do what Jeff did, which is go out and gather the data. But I feel like companies that tend to take big swings into other verticals, the conglomerations, the…

AI assessment note: “All of that change happens incredibly incrementally, making little shifts in each direction”

Q is a little bit harder to do, I think, because it's so common for people to want to do as many different things as they possibly can in order to provide as much value for as many potential customers. So what do you think in, in terms of how does one figure out what they should be focused on? How do they know what to cut out of their business?

A Listening to you speak two things really struck me very quickly there. One of the things you said is that, um, you focus more on experiences than on items. Um, there's an entire field of, uh, technology focused on quote unquote, the customer experience. And a lot of what you sit down with when we consult on customer experience with a client is, okay, I land on this page. What do you want me to do? Oh, well, I want you to buy this thing. Okay. Then why aren't you telling me you want me to buy this thing? You have 75 other things on this page except the experience you want me to have, right? And so we litter the customer focus with all of these other items. On top of that, what people often don't realize when they are inspired with an idea is that is exactly what happens when you create all of these things as a business. If you need to move them You have to move all of them. You have to maintain all of them. You have to upkeep them because that's the other thing too. It's not just that you have a chair and if that chair breaks and you're like, ah, we don't need another chair. If that chair breaks, now you have, you do have some customer base that will use that chair. And if you get rid of that chair, they're going to groan and complain. And most business owners are going to give into that. And I see that often, even giving into it at the point where It's an expense for them to ma…

AI assessment note: “It's an expense for them to maintain it. And there's literally no revenue left”

Q How long do you give a feature before you decide whether or not to get rid of it?

A Instantly, right? Um, the, the cheapest time to cut a feature is Is in its absolute infancy, uh, when you're, you're devising if it's an idea, right? Um, many people will forgo sitting in a room and really giving themselves the hard litmus test of saying, does this actually fit with our business? Does this actually procure revenue? Does this actually Uh, truly increase customer engagement or happiness or some sort of key progress indicator. A lot of the times ideas are very kind of ethereal and mushy and throw stuff at the wall. Let's see if this works and which is a very agile mentality, but there's costs involved there. Uh, and we see this a lot in startups where they're, they're throwing things at the wall until they run out of cash. Um, so I think you, you really have to have that hard Conversation in the room before when it's on paper before you're even doing anything. I think short of that, You need to put it out there, uh, and there's this other idea of, like, I'm gonna drop a feature. Everyone's gonna magically find it. It's this magical thinking of the internet, right? Um, what people don't realize is the internet, even on your own website, you're basically shouting into a black hole, right? Um, because they're, speaking of focus, I mean, there's, there's literally more websites on, on the planet than there are people.

AI assessment note: “the cheapest time to cut a feature is Is in its absolute infancy”