Prove the Impact of Your Work

Question

Dear HN I am at a dilemma and seek the crowd wisdom. How can I justify the work I'm doing? (or rather: want to do).I work at a B2B software company (~1500 R&D, and few thousands of people doing sales, support etc). We have one main product (accounts for the majority of sales) - a hardware appliance with two bundles of licenses - basic and premium. When the product is sold it comes with the premiumm for some time and then it depends on the customer decision whether to renew the premium bundle, pay for the basic one, or somewhere in between (pay for some of the premium features). The problem arises when I want to decide/suggest features to add to the product. I'm being asked how will it affect the sales of the product - and this question is terribly difficult.. sure I can measure the usage of the feature I'd like to add - but it might not affect the bottom line $$$ at all. I can also find examples of features that nobody uses but did improve sales because of their effect on the positioning of the product.How do you measure effect of a feature which is part of a much larger product? How can I measure if it was significant in the customer decision to buy / renew? any examples?

mswen · Accepted Answer

In an organization that size there should be a whole team of internal experts as well as independent, external customer and product research resources devoted to understanding customer needs and desires. Those needs should be researched and matched up to projected solutions within your product.
Those high level solutions should be articulated in a feature roadmap. If appropriate product research has been conducted you will have explored the problem and potential features in depth with customer interviews, focus groups and broader survey customer research to gauge impact on customer retention, license upgrades and then extended that research to understand impact on acquiring new customers.
As an engineer with a feature idea find a way to get it on the radar of that product research team so they can see about validating it with customers.
Having been a professional researcher doing exactly that kind of validation at one point, and now doing a fair amount of development, I have come to believe that building a sandboxed prototype is better than just trying to describe the conceptualized feature. But be careful not to invest too much, time, money or emotional commitment in the prototype. Get it in front of customers for reaction as soon as possible.
If you want more examples and stories feel free to reach out.

mxmlndr · Answer

I suspect that you are not the person who decides which feature will be implemented? So first I would try to understand how the management or a product owner normally decides which feature is next and which KPIs are used to make a decision. And beside that I would listen to the needs of my clients (I know that this sounds a bit too easy). Are they happy with the product? Do they wish something else? Is there a platform for enhancement requests etc. where you can match your idea or just talk to the sales-people as they normally know what clients miss in features.