» Lean 4, Fat 0: Some Arguments We Have Had at KISSmetrics over Lean Stuff

Lean 4, Fat 0: Some Arguments We Have Had at KISSmetrics over Lean Stuff

April 22nd, 2010

I’ve seen a lot of great examples of situations where a company built out a product or feature and then no one cared. But what about the reverse?

“What if we don’t build the right (beautiful/efficient/fully-featured/scalable) thing,

and because of that, something horrible happens?”

We try pretty hard to be lean at KISSmetrics, but we still have a lot of internal debate sometimes around whether and when we should build things. These are 4 arguments we’ve had over the last 6 or 7 months, and in all cases, Lean was right.

We need a First User Experience as part of the initial KISSmetrics beta.

The argument: I’ve written multiple times about the importance of a good guiding first user experience and I looked at what we were starting out with and said, “everyone is going to show up, get confused, and never come back.” I mean, I totally thought I was right on this one.

What happened: Our initial beta customers were classic early adopter types who didn’t mind experimenting with our API and writing some Javascript, and were able to use the product and provide tons of valuable feedback to us, all without requiring a wizard to guide them through the process.

Now, 6+ months later, we’re starting to get beyond that initial “early adopter” population, and we’re definitely seeing that beta customers would benefit from a guided setup. So we’re investing the time in building out a proper first user experience. But did we need it back in October ’09? No.

Lean 1, Fat 0.

We need more granular controls around how much data we show in the initial KISSmetrics beta.

The argument: In the interest of releasing quickly, the initial version only showed your funnel for your last 10,000 events. No date filtering, and no historical data. For high-traffic sites, this might be less than a day’s worth of activity! Come on, we really should let people show the last week or the last month, or give them date-pickers – right?

What happened: About half of our earliest beta customers were smaller startups, so the low amount of data wasn’t an issue. The other half weren’t crazy about it, but they gave us useful feedback on how they wanted to dice up their data.

Now, 6+ months later, we just released custom date pickers this morning. Yeah, people have been complaining about this for awhile – but they’ve stuck around and continued using our product in the meantime.

Lean 2, Fat 0.

We need a super cool relative date picker in Sharefeed.

The argument: Shouldn’t a product that’s built around scheduling have a really nice, dead-simple way of indicating dates? Like, if I want a tweet to go out tomorrow, why can’t I just type in “tomorrow”? (The classic “wouldn’t it be cool if…” problem.)

What happened: Other priorities intervened and no developers got past the initial experimenting state. We’ve been using Sharefeed internally for over 4 months now, and the lack of a cool date picker is not a pain point. Not a single person has emailed us complaining about our date picker.

Lean 3, Fat 0.

“KISSinsights – there’s not much there, is there?”

The argument: OK, I don’t think those were Hiten’s exact words, but they weren’t far off. The very first version was missing most of the survey configuration options, an “about” page, password reset, and the admin pages (which only we could see) had typos and stray list element bullets. It was not pretty.

What happened: No one (except me) noticed the lack of an “about” page. One person emailed me so we could manually reset his password. By getting that product out in the hands of real people quickly, we knew exactly what features to build/refine next.

2 months later, we have a still-minimal but definitely-viable product, and 700+ beta users.

Lean 4, Fat 0.

I’m speaking at Startup Lessons Learned tomorrow – hope to see you there!

Popularity: 4% [?]

You should add this blog to your RSS feed.

Popularity: 4% [?]

http://www.ubervu.com/conversations/www.cindyalvarez.com/learning/lean-4-fat-0-some-arguments-we-have-had-at-kissmetrics-over-lean-stuff uberVU – social comments

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by cindyalvarez: Lean 4, Fat 0: Arguments we’ve had at @KISSmetrics around lean stuff & the results (world did not end) – http://bit.ly/bAglxT...
steve

If I do this approach with my baby, and it blows up in my face, NO SOUP FOR YOU CINDY!
inspirational. now if we could just remove fear, we'd be getting somewhere.
alexandermimran

Great to see some detailed examples of saying no to features. It's tough to do!

Imagine building a a car with no legroom, no backseat, a small trunk, not drivable in the winter, no cup holders, an engine in the back of the car, and a price tag to scare away most potential buyers… Doesn't sound like anyone would buy it. But Porsche is wildly successful.

Being lean means making the hard decisions no matter how counter-intuitive they are!
http://www.cindyalvarez.com cindyalvarez

One of the hardest things to accept is that there is a long time horizon – if you don't build a feature now, that doesn't mean you're NEVER going to build it.

Back when I worked in a waterfall environment, not getting a feature in meant it would be 6 months to a YEAR before the PM could try again – which led to this horrible feature binge “let's build it all now now now” … and lots of wasted code.

It's all about optimizing building the right things at the right time – to align with what your current customer base looks like, to align with your internal resources, whether you've found product-market fit or not.
http://mrtweet.com/community/leanstartup/20100423?src=pingback Most Tweeted Articles by Lean Startups Experts

[...] 2 Tweets Seeing Both Sides VC Perspectives From A Former Entrepreneur 2 Tweets » Lean 4, Fat 0: Some Arguments We Have Had at KISSmetrics over Lean Stuff The Experience is … I've seen a lot of great examples of situations where a company built out a product or feature [...]
http://rafaelbandeira3.wordpress.com Rafael Bandeira

Hey Cindy, how was the approach to get to “no”? From what I see, some of the features were “desired” but ended up out, how they got out?
http://www.cindyalvarez.com cindyalvarez

It's not that we had an approach to get to NO, it's that everything needs justification to get to YES.

These things were INTERNALLY desired, but when talking to customers, they were not signaling that these things were important. (In the first user experience case, I even tried sort of hinting at it to customers – to no avail!) So we decided to wait and see if the feature became required later or not at all.
http://www.cindyalvarez.com cindyalvarez

Which — to clarify — does not mean that customers were defining our vision. For KISSmetrics and KISSinsights, we had a strong sense of the problem we wanted to solve and the audience to solve it for.

But we (like anyone else) can get distracted by shiny things that are cool but don't advance that vision. So when we say “but I want…”, we act as checks and balances on each other internally to make sure that it's something that advances our vision and is needed now as opposed to just a shiny object.
http://twitter.com/StevenLoi Steven Loi

I think I was the one that e-mailed Hiten for a pw reset. :)
http://twitter.com/cindyalvarez cindyalvarez

Lean 4, Fat 0: Arguments we’ve had at @KISSmetrics around lean stuff & the results (world did not end) – http://bit.ly/bAglxT

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://twitter.com/ericries ericries

This is a must-read (and very funny) RT @cindyalvarez: Lean 4, Fat 0: Arguments we’ve had at @KISSmetrics http://bit.ly/bAglxT #leanstartup

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://twitter.com/ericries ericries

“What if we don’t build the right (beautiful/scalable) thing,
and because of that, something horrible happens?” http://ericri.es/cqDDuw

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://twitter.com/amicel amicel

RT @ericries: This is a must-read (and very funny) RT @cindyalvarez: Lean 4, Fat 0: Arguments we’ve had at @KISSmetrics http://bit.ly/bA …

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://twitter.com/amyjokim amyjokim

great story-telling from @cindyalvarez about her lean startup adventures http://bit.ly/d3U9SZ /via @ericries

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://twitter.com/ericnsantos ericnsantos

RT @cindyalvarez Lean 4, Fat 0: Arguments we’ve had at @KISSmetrics around lean stuff & the results – http://bit.ly/bAglxT

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://twitter.com/alexview alexview

Lean 4, Fat 0: Some Arguments We Have Had at KISSmetrics over Lean Stuff, by @cindyalvarez – http://bit.ly/cSbiNI

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://twitter.com/tungholio tungholio

RT @amyjokim great story-telling from @cindyalvarez about her lean startup adventures http://bit.ly/d3U9SZ /via @ericries

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://twitter.com/enterity enterity

RT @cindyalvarez: Lean 4, Fat 0: Args we’ve had at @KISSmetrics around lean stuff & the results (world did not end) – http://bit.ly/bAglxT

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://twitter.com/sandeepshetty sandeepshetty

4 arguments at KISSmetrics around whether and when they should build things, and in all cases, Lean was right http://bit.ly/arWRnl

This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://twitter.com/amimran amimran

RT @cindyalvarez Lean 4, Fat 0: Arguments we’ve had at @KISSmetrics around lean stuff & the results (world did not end) http://bit.ly/bAglxT

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

Better Product Managers, and Product Management