Features vs UX

Most early-stage startup founders have limited dev resources and however much you try, you can only maximise your dev output to a certain level which means that you simply cannot build everything you want to…

I was recently speaking to a founder friend who was at the same crossroads, with 10 dev resources at his disposal, his question was a simple yet complicated one -

Should I focus my time and effort into the small quality of life improvement which improve the user experience or should I focus on building out more powerful features?

That’s a great question because everyone in the tech community is asking themselves this question right now…

Here’s my take on it -
Obviously, as an early-stage company, you can’t do everything. While unfortunate, it is a reality you have to deal with.

How to utilise the rest of your manpower is a tricky question but I want to reinstate one key piece of advice which I’ve given hundreds of times before - build sh*t which people wish to.

Before deciding your roadmap, go to your users and figure out what they value. You also need to look at each feature in its absolute. For example, you may view dark mode as a quality-of-life improvement but for many users (myself included) not having dark mode on a platform is a big enough reason not to use the platform altogether.

Another set of examples would be one of my close friends. She works in the marketing division of a startup and isn’t a power user of most tools - her interaction frequency is quite high but her interaction level is quite low, which is to say that she isn’t a user of most advanced features but does have a pretty high usage frequency of her tools. For her, she wouldn’t care much about the new features you have brewing, but instead, would care more about the quality of interaction (ie, the UX).

Another contradictory example to the previous one is that of another friend of mine, and her role at a series B startup is that of a VP of development. For someone who runs Linux (and refuses to upgrade to any other OS), she is heavily inclined towards software with high functionality - for her quality of UX is irrelevant but instead, the functionality that the platform offers is a hundred times more relevant.

Therefore, at every step of the way, it’s important for you to go back to your user and see what they want, what they value and what they need. One of the basic ideas which I talk about is to Find A Niche, that is, identify and isolate a group of individuals whose needs you’re trying to satisfy with the product you are building. If these individuals care a lot about features, then go for building features.

Now, another one of the founders I work with, asked me a great question - what will it take to get both features and a good UX.

To respond to this question, I would like to cite the example of the note-taking tool Notion. Now, Notion is a huge company with a $10B valuation so they’ve definitely done quite a lot of things right, but amongst all of these things that they’ve done right - I would like to cite a very important one. On the surface, Notion seems like a very simple-to-use software - it gives the impression of a very people-friendly user experience (contrasting to more pro-specific note-taking apps like Roam Research where the learning curve is extremely steep). This basically means that users who don’t care much about the functionality but instead care a lot about the user experience are going to feel right at home. The app has a delightful experience even if you want to stick to the bare basics. On the other hand, if you’re a power user, Notion has done something incredible for you… Under the surface, past the facade of the easy-to-use platform, lies extreme power. And this power is just so well implemented that it can satisfy the needs of even the most hardcore note-takers.

The reason I wanted to cite the example of Notion is that they’ve managed to pull off having a very strong user experience for both the ‘we want good UX, not features’ and the power users. How did they pull it off? They focused on attacking one niche first.