Why users ignore your best features.

Many corporations and startups excitedly tell me, “Our product is great! Users can do this; users can do that; and they can even do these things!” And my response to them has been, “Yes, you are telling me all the things your users can do. But you have not explained to me why the user would do it.”

These problems illustrate a common product development quandary. People who love tech gadgets want new products that do cool new things. This creates the customer demand that gives product developers like me incentive to add new features. Yet none of us wants these products and features to be confusing, to lead us astray, to drive us down a softwar

You need to get them to the “aha moment,” when they experience the value of your product. For example, in the early days, the Netflix team figured out that if new signups added three movies to their queue in the first 90 seconds, they were much more likely to become paying subscribers compared to those who had a hard time finding good movies to ren

While Hipstamatic built a great tool, it was Instagram that used network effects to win the market. The Instagram versus Hipstamatic story is perhaps the canonical example of a strategy made famous by Chris Dixon’s 2015 essay “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” Chris writes: A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to cal

Palm, on the other hand, regrouped. It surveyed Zoomer buyers to find out what they liked and didn’t like, what they used and didn’t use: What these people said opened the company’s eyes. More than 90% of Zoomer owners also owned a PC. More than half of them bought Zoomer because of software (offered as an add-on) that transferred data to and from