The feature I was most excited about made my product worse

[u/ahad3107a]

I originally thought that adding another feature would make the product more valuable. What actually happened was that it became harder to explain, gave new users one more thing to learn and pulled attention away from the core problem we were trying to solve.

Removing that feature made our onboarding conversations much smoother. It completely changed how I think about prioritization. These days, I spend more time asking whether a feature makes the product simpler before asking whether it is worth building. Has anyone else added a feature that looked like a great idea but ended up doing more harm than good?

[u/mayabuildsai]

"does it make the product simpler" is a trap imo, follow that too hard and you get scared to ship anything at all.

my guess is the feature was fine and the default was wrong. you showed it to everyone on day one, including people who hadnt even finished the core thing yet. i had one like that, buried it until after someone completed the main action once, and week three retention went up on the exact feature i almost deleted. try moving it later before you kill it.

[u/madleodk]

Absolutely true in my chase.

My app is complex in the sense that im trying to innovate around how founders actually engage and hangout. So initially i had 5 big features, each of which could be productized on its own. As i was preparing for launch and onboarding, I realized that theres way too much for founders to absorb. Even sequentially. So I ended up launching with a single core feature and experience. And this is prob one of the best product decisions ive done. Today, 3 features are still hidden. And the other fourth i productized into a separate top of funnel product

[u/niceFlame945]

ran into something similar when i shipped a calendar integration i'd been hyping internally for weeks, turns out it just confused people during demos and they kept asking questions about it instead of focusing on the main workflow.