BENEFITS, NOT FEATURES: 30 QUOTES

• Reid Hoffman: Founder, LinkedIn

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

• Tim Cook

A great product isn’t just a collection of features. It’s how it all works together.

• Marco Arment: Founder, Instapaper

Making a product better often requires removing features.

• Kathy Sierra

The secret to building great products is not creating awesome features, it’s to make users awesome.

• Jay Abraham

Sell the benefits, not your company or the product. People buy results, not features.

• Dave McClure: Founder, 500 Startups

Features are like having sex. You make one mistake and you have to support it for life.

• Paul Buchheit

Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else … By focusing on only a few core features in the first version, you are forced to find the true essence and value of the product.

• John Wesley

Our old system was just not able to accommodate our newest product features. Our goal was to get a stable, scalable, system that would help us speed new products to market.

• Kevin Systrom

The best feature is less featureless.

• Douglas Crockford

We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to customers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce that designs that assemble long list of features.

• Eric Ries

I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do – every action you take in product development, marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do – is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort.

• Steve Blank

We now know that something between 85 and 90 percent of most software product features are unwanted and unneeded by customers. That is an enormous amount of waste of time and money that ends up on the floor.

• Sergey Brin

We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don’t want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features.

• Jakob Nielsen

Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.

• Cindy Alvarez

What features your customers as for is never as interesting as why they want them.

• Alan Cooper

Reducing a product’s definition to a list of features and functions ignores the real opportunity – orchestrating technological capability to serve human needs and goals.

• Jefferson Han

If you watched companies such as Sony and Samsung grow, they focused first on features and then on industrial design, which made their products look and feel better.

• Tony Fadell

No amount of data will tell you if a feature should be in the product, because it doesn’t exist. You need to have a very clear leader with a clear point of view…otherwise, you get a mishmash of features and stuff that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

• Ram Shriram

You want to do a few things really well because you want to come out with a product that is fully baked, even though it may be lacking in a few features or whatever, rather than the one that’s all-achieving but not doing anything too well.

• Gregory Benford

It turns out that if you optimize the performance of a car and of an airplane, they are very far away in terms of mechanical features. So you can make a flying car. But they are not very good planes, and they are not very good planes.

• Scott Adams

Normal people…believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.

• James Surowiecki

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.

• John Carmack

The cost of adding a feature isn’t just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. The trick is to pick the features that don’t fight each other.

• Jeffrey Gitomer

I don’t want features, I want value. I don’t want benefits, I want value.

• David Karp

Every feature has some maintenance cost, and having fewer features lets us focus on the ones we care about and make sure they work very well.

• Stephen Baker

Prices are coming down. And they have the features and benefits people want.

• Tim Locke

Hardwood floors are very popular features in new homes. Many individuals are also installing hardwood floors when they renovate their residences. Consumers realize that this feature adds value to their investment.

• Emmett Shear

This is true for most new products. The majority of people you’re competing with are non-users. They are people who have never used your service before. And what they say is actually the most important. What they say is the thing that blocks you from expanding the size of your market with your features.

• Carl Sagan

The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer.

• Leah Culver

Learn not to add too many features right away, and get the core idea built and tested.

Image: Imani Clovis