Are You Fighting Product Management Inertia?

Are You Fighting Product Management Inertia?:from B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify by Zach Okun
A couple months ago, I found myself in a conversation with friends where it became clear that none of us were perfectly clear on the definition of inertia. One friend thought ‘inert’ simply meant immobile, or stuck. But an object in motion has inertia. So it’s more like momentum then? Then we started introducing things like friction and resistance and velocity and … Eventually, we did what we modern humans do and pulled out a mobile phone and went to the universal arbiter of truth – Wikipedia. The official definition?
Inertia: the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest, or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion.
Later I got to thinking about inertia as it relates to my job–product management. The thing is, software products (and software companies) have a very clear and dangerous inertia. In this case, the “state of motion” is a motion of constantly adding features.
In my time in product management I’ve had hundreds of conversations with customers. Not once have I heard a customer request the removal of a feature. However, people always have an idea for something to add. A great quote from (the Woody Allen masterpiece) Annie Hall goes: “A relationship, I think, is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.” Product development is also like a shark. It too has to constantly move forward. And forward tends to be more, more, more. A customer requests X. Another customer threatens to leave without Y. The sales person could have closed the deal if only we had Z. A prospect points out that our competitor has … you get the point.
But here’s the thing. Customer satisfaction is not measured by number of features. In fact, here’s a nice little graph that’s a bit more accurate:

But that chart is talking about people who have already committed to using the product (i.e., customers). When you expand the discussion to include folks who are considering using the product (i.e., prospects), it gets even more interesting. One of my favorite social psychology studies/experiments looks at the difference between how people perceive abundance of choice versus how they behave when given an abundance of choices. A table was set up at a grocery store with jams for customers to taste. Half the time, customers were given a choice from among 6 jams, and the other half they could choose from among 24 jams. Get this: a greater percentage of passersby stopped at the booth when there were more to choose from (~60% vs ~40%). But when it came time to make a decision, the people with fewer jams to choose from bought one 30% of the time. When there were a ton of jams to choose from, only 3%(!) bought one.
In short, people *think* they want more choices just like they *think* they want more features. But in reality, constraining choices leads to greater satisfaction.
This intuitively made sense to me because I grew up in southern California, aka the land of In-N-Out Burger. The menu at In-N-Out is an exercise in simplicity of choice:

It also intuitively makes sense when you compare the choices of an Apple laptop versus the overwhelming options at someplace like a Best Buy.
So how is a product manager to respond to this situation? Prospects (think they) want a ton of features. Sales people want a ton of features (in order to woo prospects). Customers request more features (and often very specific features that work for their very specific use case). But if you listen to all of them, you’ll build a monstrosity. And all of this doesn’t take into account the almost-always-ignored maintenance costs of adding features.
The short answer is ‘very carefully’. I’ll save a more detailed discussion of how we approach feature prioritization here at Optify (including feature requests from all stakeholders) for a bit later. But for now, I want to just pose the question as a good mental exercise for everyone: what is the inertia you are fighting and how do you fight it? Better yet, can you influence the “state of motion” so that inertia is working in your favor?