What to do with your best and worst features

Developing product features can be a delicate balancing act.

By offering the best features and options for your user base, you can push your product from good to excellent. But too many features can cause frustration and tip things the other way.

Our Copilot.cx Segment NPS can help here, allowing you to map which features form the core value of your product and which ones correlate with the highest levels of satisfaction.

Over time, you'll be able to build up a list of your best and worst features based on usage and satisfaction. Then comes the exciting part: what to do about it.

Define your top three features

The first step is to define your product's top three features. For a smart bulb, this could be:

1. Turning the light on and off in the app
2. Setting the light's color temperature in the app
3. Turning the light on and off using voice control

These features can then form a product usage baseline. You may choose to set the same baseline for your entire user base, or you could choose different features based on different user segments.

Once you've defined these features, you should embed them in the ramp up and discovery stages of onboarding and highlight them in your welcome email.

Educate users about your more advanced features

The next step is to increase adoption of your more advanced features. Sticking with the smart bulb example, this could be:

1. Setting a day and night routine in the app
2. Linking multiple smart bulbs to create a scene
3. Integrating the light into a Google Home routine

Identify high-value features that are only used by around 20% of your user base. Then set up educational campaigns to encourage adoption.

The aim here is to increase feature adoption from 80-20 to 80-80 – that means getting 80% of your users to use 80% of your features.

Get rid of what doesn’t work

The final step is to challenge the features that have very low adoption or offer very little value.

Do you need 15 speeds on your fan? Does anyone really use the special options on your microwave? Is it worth maintaining a feature that's only used by 0.4% of your user base? Probably not.

The goal here is to make your app and devices as lean and clean as possible. This helps to reduce frustration and increase satisfaction.

After taking a deeper look into feature usage patterns, many companies working with Copilot.cx decided to remove features that are only used by tiny fractions of their user base. Some have even removed physical buttons in new iterations of their products.

It all comes down to this: if the feature isn't making the user experience better, there's a risk that it's making it worse.