top of page
  • Writer's pictureMatthew Lerner

Start with "No."

The most expensive thing you can do as a startup is to add a product feature. I think most leaders have no idea how much a new product feature costs!


Calculating The Fully Loaded Cost

  • Engineering time itself is far more valuable than money - you cannot simply exchange money for good dev hours like a vending machine.

  • Each new feature adds ongoing costs to document, QA (with each release), support, and maintain (regression testing with every launch and work on it with every system upgrade, iOS update, etc.), which means you need to hire more engineers.

  • It makes your product more complex = harder for customers to use (and CS to support), which can diminish customer value and narrow your appeal to a handful of power-users.

  • It makes your proposition more complex, which makes it harder to market and sell. ( 'product marketing’ pulls marketers away from demand gen activities).

Therefore, when you’re deciding what to build, the default option should be “no.” And each new idea should have to fight its way onto the roadmap.


How to Decide?

Each new feature idea is based on an implicit (unproven) assumption that it will boost acquisition and/or customer delight. Make that assumption explicit and draft it as a hypothesis (if-then prediction with a measurable customer behaviour outcome). Find a way to validate that assumption before you build the feature. Here’s an amazing post from Ash Maurya with lean experimentation techniques that do not require building product.


Acknowledgements: Thanks to Mo Syed for helping me understand the true fully loaded cost of a new feature, and to Danny Yau and Robert Desmond for reviewing drafts of this missive.

307 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Imagine if everyone in your startup consolidated their 2024 goals into a single list. How long would it be? If it’s longer than 3 items, keep reading. There’s a pattern in the early days of any great

If I told you a B2B business had 90% customer churn, would you invest? What if I told you they gross $28B and have a 10-year CAGR of 16%? So how can such a strong business have 90% customer churn? Her

What I learned from Wise's first Head of Growth Transferwise (now Wise) grew from zero to $1B in revenue in the past 10 years in a very competitive market. How did they find their big growth lever bac

bottom of page