Intercom on Product Management

Building a great product isn’t about creating tons of tactically useful features which are tangentially related. It’s about delivering a cohesive product within well defined parameters.

We’ve tried this feature with a small group and engagement is off the charts.” Often this approach suffers from selective data analysis. Products are complex systems. What appears to be an increase in engagement is really just pushing numbers around from place to place

There’s no right way to prioritize a roadmap, but there are plenty of wrong ones. If there are opportunities in existing product areas, and your roadmap ignores them in favour of new features, then you’ll soon be that jack-of-all-jobs product.

’s not free in the communication of doing it. If you add a feature, you have to tell your team, to tell customer support, to then tell your customers. You have to tell your customers, otherwise it’s definitely pointless. Communication is never free.

Product design is about cost-benefit analysis.

There’s a big difference between the retail price and cost of ownership.

You can improve an existing feature in three different ways:
You can make it better (deliberate improvement).
You can change it so customers use it more often (frequency improvement).
Or you can change it so more people can use it (adoption improvement).

any given feature with limited adoption, you have four choices:
Kill it: admit defeat, and start to remove it from your product.
Increase the adoption rate: get more people to use it.
Increase the frequency: get people to use it more often.
Deliberately improve it: make it quantifiably better for those who use it

you are looking at a chart like this you are vulnerable to disruption, in the true Clay Christensen sense of the phrase. Someone can build a simple product, focussing on that one key feature that’s superior in just one way (cheaper, faster, collaborative, easier to use, mobile etc.), and you’ll struggle to compete, because you’re carrying all those other junk features around too.

We see a 10x increase in communications (as do our customers) from in-app messages over email announcements, and there are other, softer, benefits too. For example when we announced the new map sharing features in Intercom, our users clicked straight through, were immediately impressed and started sharing the location of their customers around the world. I can’t imagine an email achieving a similar effect