Customers want curation but ask for features

People’s first impulse is to request more features, but they’re more satisfied with curated choices.

How much can your smartphone do? Browse the web? Take pictures and video? Store your to-do list? Find you a nearby coffee shop? Book a hotel room? Make a phone call? Perhaps a better question is, what can’t your smartphone do?

People are first inclined to choose the product with more features. “I don’t know what that button does,” the consumer says to himself, “but what if I need it?” Fear that a useful or exciting feature will be missed leads most to select the product with everything. John Maeda says that to customers, “more is safety ((Siegel, pg. 82)).”

Customer feedback is a critical factor in the success of a lean startup. If a business doesn’t build a product customers want, they won’t survive. An entrepreneur must not confuse the customer’s initial requests for additional features with the core value of their product, however.

Once a product is in the wild, customers will ask for more. People who don’t even use the product for its intended purpose will ask to add new features. Others who use two products will ask you to wrap both into one. If polled, few if any customers will say “no” to questions about features that might be added. When a business adds all the features their customers have requested they may find that not even the customers who wanted those features will use their product any longer. It’s become too complex and too much of a hassle. Instead, those customers will find another business who gives them what they needed all along - the feature you started with before you added everything else.

While customers, out of a sense of safety or fear of missing out, may never turn down new features, what customers want is a curator. They want a business they trust to do the hard work of distilling their available options into a manageable choice and hiding all the rest. This may result in product simplification, or it may mean an entire business based solely on distilling the marketplace into a manageable form for customers to use.

Case Study #1: Baby Gear Lab

The world of baby gear is enormous. For example, there seem as many stroller manufacturers as car manufacturers, each one arguing that they have the best such-and-such. An overwhelmed consumer like myself, when faced with endless variety, shuts down and looks for the stroller with the most features. At least I won’t be missing anything. Websites like BabyGearLab cater to people like me by giving confident and clear reviews that not only help me decide which stroller to buy, they also help me to see what’s important and what’s only nice to have.

Case Study #2: Trader Joe’s

Anyone who’s stepped foot in a grocery store in the last twenty years has discovered that most grocery stores are dehumanizing. One of the elements that contribute to this dehumanization is the overwhelming experience of too many choices.

Whether it’s due to contractual agreements, package deals, or what, most grocery stores offer ten different marinara sauce options. Different brands, different prices. How does one filter through all this noise to a decision?

Enter Trader Joe’s. Do you know how many marinara sauce options you have? Basil or Garlic. Two. That’s it. Do you know something else? They’re cheaper than most of the options at Jewel. And guess what? They taste better.

Trader Joe’s business model is built upon product curation. Because average people don’t need every possible marinara sauce in the American mid-west, they just need one good sauce. And so Trader Joe’s does the labor of testing the options then hides the whole process behind their brand name. They have discovered that simplicity is not about maximum optimization, simplicity is empathetic.

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