That feature you built to help close a lucrative deal?
You lost money on it.
You didn't charge anywhere near enough.
Oh, you didn't even charge for it?!!
Did they they ever even use it?
Are they even still a customer?
Here's why you lost
Three major reasons:
Future maintenance tax
You factored in only the cost of building the feature.
But it's still costing you every sprint — because you have to make sure it didn't break.
You also need to keep it well maintained in line with the rest of your product.
Complexity tax
Complexity increases with each additional feature, so:
Each new feature increases the cost of every future feature.
For your product's lifetime, you've just made it slightly more time consuming and expensive to develop anything new.
Opportunity costs
Saying yes to these extra efforts meant saying no to adding features that will possibly drive high impact outcomes for your business.
Recommendations
Charge a LOT more for doing "Customer Specials," or agree only to bring forward features that are already planned — but still charge extra for this.
Keep track of the percentage of your effort capacity you spend on "Customer Specials." Agree on a budget that you won't be pressured to exceed.
Instrument your product to measure feature usage, and get rid of unused features. (Sorry, I meant "retire" them.)
P.S.
Are you a CTO, VP or Dir. of Engineering? — Can you imagine being able to focus every sprint on delivering high impact business outcomes?
👉 Reply to this email with the word "OUTCOMES".
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