Are you stuck in the Product Death Cycle?

Joni Lindgren and Jasmin Yaya take on a trap a lot of product teams fall into without noticing, the Product Death Cycle: no one uses the product, so you ask users which features are missing, so you build the missing feature, and still no one uses the product. Round and round.

The point the hosts keep coming back to is that building the features users ask for rarely lifts adoption. The more useful question runs the other way. Instead of asking active users what to add, ask the users who left why they stopped. With roughly 80% of new users gone before day 30, that departing group is where the real learning sits, and it is the group most teams never talk to.

They land it with an analogy. When the only skill on the team is building features, every problem starts to look like it needs another feature. So the harder question is why you are reaching for a feature at all. Sometimes the answer is onboarding, sometimes pricing, sometimes positioning, and no amount of new features will fix those.

The episode builds on an earlier Datadrivet installment, “Next Feature Fallacy,” and a tweet from David J. Bland on the same pattern.

The takeaway: when usage is flat, resist the feature reflex, go talk to the people who churned, and find out what actually broke.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for the whole discussion.