As a developer, I have built many features. I wouldn’t say all, but many of them were a waste of everyones time. These features were usually built because the product group told us to build them. I found product teams make these decisions based upon some customer interviews, email feedbacks, phone complains and mostly their “gut”. And its hurts the most when we would bust our asses building and releasing it, to only realize that our customers are not using it. Reasons vary from customers wanting X and we building Y to the user flow not being right. Its further disappointing to learn after a release that customers didn’t even care enough to click on the feature i built, forget about using it.<p>Prioritizing what to build, which features to double down on and which ones to ignore, what to prototype and what to scrap etc. are all important questions which the product team needs to decide. In their defense I feel like these are difficult questions. To me its just that I don't think they can afford to get this wrong. Building the wrong features, maintaining them and then eventually killing them is very expensive and just a moral killer.<p>The question in my mind is can product teams make better product decisions? Why do we have to ask developers to build things, release it and then learn whether customers really wanted it. To address this issue and empower product teams I have built www.featureKicker.com. It enables teams to deploy features before building them, collect feedback, analyze data and make better, more informed, data backed decisions. It enables a product manager to look a developer in his or her eye and say “I need you to build X and I need it done by Y. I have Z number of customers waiting for it. Here you can read what they have to say”.<p>I would love to hear from the community of what they think of this solution. I want to help companies make better product decisions and am looking at the community for guidance.<p>Sandeep
CTO
FeatureKicker.com
I checked the website, looks promising so congratulations on that.
I do have a comment, your entire website is still linking to your Heroku subdomain.<p>If I'm not mistaken, this pretty much feels like A/B testing with the implementation being a survey.<p>So have you tested users' sentiments about trying to use a feature only to realize it isn't implemented and then being promoted to answer a few questions?<p>I'd speak for myself, I'd rather not see a button to for example Authenticate with my Twitter account if it doesn't work, than to see one of which when I try to use it, I get asked a few questions.<p>I'd feel that's a bummer.<p>To that point, why would I use FeatureKicker instead of a service like Qualaroo, which works fairly well.
I think this is amazing.. a huge problem all around and a very clever solution. Surveys are broken, putting the feature on site and testing who clicks on it-- so good!! Engineers all over the world thank you!!<p>Any thoughts on how to do this for "non-button" content features? Like say, do our users want to see product images in the search result page?
Update video to show g+ example and results no more no less about 20 secs tops - the video on main site takes to long to show the meat of what you do...<p>bar that, not a bad product we just built something not to dissimilar in house for our needs, this would have saved a ton of time...<p>Good luck with the product.<p>-Scott