“Small is Big” – Of User Intent and How Great Products are Built on Small Features
Product Management is all about attention to detail and if you are an entrepreneur building that one big product, which can change the world, think of small features (sometimes, they are too small to be called features – they are mere utilities) that immensely enhances the user experience.
One of the main reasons why users prefer one product over the other is trust – and you don’t gain trust by putting up your uptime numbers. You gain trust by helping your users in their decision, by helping them to not commit mistakes when they are using the product. You gain immense trust when your product exactly understands the user intent and is a ‘F**king Cool” experience
Here are few examples from Google which reinforces the belief that ‘small is big’.
Chrome – ‘Paste and Go’
You copy a URL and paste that on Chrome’s address box. Google saves you an extra click with ‘Paste and Go’ option. Your intent of copying and pasting the url is pretty clear – so why not help you achieve the same?
Google Chrome - Paste and Go
Gmail – “Report Spam” for any of the google group email
Public Google groups are open to spammers and once in a while spammers will send out ‘viagra’, ‘earn money’ email. So what do you do? Report them as spam?
And what if you want to unsubscribe from a group which has been taken over by spammers?
Here is what Gmail does (ofcourse, only for googlegroups emails)
Gmail presents couple of options, i.e. whether you want to auto-unsubscribe from the group, report the message as spam. Again, saves one click.
Google Groups - Report Spam Feature
Similarly, if you have multiple attachments in your email, Gmail offers ‘download as zip’ file – saves many clicks and is a god-send feature (which is now being copied by all other email clients).
Chrome – ‘Paste and Search’
You copy a URL and paste that on Chrome’s address box. Google saves you an extra click with ‘Paste and Search’ option.
After all, your intent of copying and paste a text is to search for it.
Google Chrome - Paste and Search
Great products are built on user intent and it’s not just those big feature that counts, it’s those small utilities that enhances one’s experience and increases the stickiness of the product. Tthere is an element of serendipity in these features, they are there when you need them (and are invisible otherwise).
What really happens during product development process is that these small features are often de-prioritized and eventually lose out to grand features – so think twice before you move them from P2 to P3 (and finally, out of the roadmap).
What’s your opinion?
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About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
Dear Sinha,
Thats what the google strategy.. See google started with gmail, as already had accounts with yahoo, AOL, MSN etc etc.
But the fact is that google slowly added each and every thing to gmail like gmail chat ( The same also in Yahoo new Version ) But the small twist is that what ever we chat in gmail chat it will be automatically stored in chats section automatically, this will be useful for future reference of chat logs, the same is not available with yahoo though it introduced chat but the chat cant be saved automatically
Gmail started picasa and you can directly install picasa to your system and scan for pics and directly upload from picasa desktop to picasa web albums. This feature is not available in yahoo and other portals
Not only these if you go to your gmail >> settings >> labs you can see many of these small tools where u can enable or disable in that section
And coming to chrome just its also a explorer like IE, Mozilla, Opera and others, the fact is that opening of pages fastly with out errors, and providing small and simple apps for better browsing that makes google chrome hit the market
For me slow and steady wins the race is what google strategy is about.. Slowly updating the applications with new features, slowly creating new apps that concentrate on common people its the real google plan i think so where as yahoo slowly shutting down its applications like yahoo photos, yahoo geocities, yahoo briefcase and others slowly year by year and the same google increasing apps year by year
Thats y small is big always in any way
So what you people respond
Thanks & Regards
Sai Pothuri
Oh come on you are becoming a google fanboy, these features are an extra delight feature, No one would have used this feature if google chrome had not focussed on speed and got the users in the first place.
“No one would have used this feature if google chrome had not focussed on speed and got the users in the first place.” – that’s not an assumption to build a product.
If you keep focusing on ‘that’ big thing and lose sight of small utilities, people will start moving to a better product.
Have to agree with Ashish here.
Speed and security are “big” things but probably not immediately and evidently important.
An awesome “awesome bar” is. And all of the small things make that bar so awesome
very well said. samall triffle examples to emphasize small is really BIG. Brings out a very subtle point.
I think the more relevant task for a PM is to a) clearly define what is it that the product/service should excel in (speed, functionality) and b) keep an open request/additions queue and prioritize these per (a) rather than think up these “delighting” features.
Without (a), the small features would not add up to something bigger and potentially introduce complexity.
Without (b), the risk could be excluding a host of ideas from the people who develop the product/service
Introducing these small improvements on a regular basis however does keep the product freshness up even when there is no major release.
a) is surely needed, but b) doesnt drive these small features. Nobody will ask for these features and that’s why they add to wow factor.
I am assuming that when you say nobody, you mean no end user which I did not mean.
In my experience as both a developer and PM such features are most likely to be introduced incrementally by motivated developers and QA folks rather than through scope by a PM.
Facilitating such thinking IMO would probably lead to more of these features. The PMs role then is to evaluate which ones get in.