How to Come Up With New Features That People Want

I opened r/founder while waiting for my Magic Mouse to charge to 2%, started writing a reply and a few minutes later realized I was writing a blog post. So here goes a slightly extended version.

A founder who built and launched products before but never hit product-market fit asked:

How do you come up with new features? Purely from user requests, or do you pitch ideas and let users upvote?

Being data-driven sounds compelling, but you won’t build a great product through feature requests or metrics. So what works? Getting super deep into your space, actually watching users struggle (painful but worth it), and having the wisdom and guts to decide which problems are actually worth solving vs which ones are just noise.

First of all, build in a domain you deeply understand. Start with a clear vision of what you want your product to accomplish for its users. You need to believe in your bones that this is worth spending your next 5-10 years on.

The first versions of your product will cover only a small percentage of that vision at best. From there, you are responsible for determining the optimal path to filling the gaps.

You don’t need users to explicitly request features (although they will) — you need to learn from them about what issues they’re running into, what’s stopping them from accomplishing their goals, and what workarounds they’re creating.

Spend time actually watching people use your product in their natural environment, not just in artificial hypothetical scenarios. Video calls will be fine, as long as you don’t tell people where to click and what to do. You’ll see firsthand what frustrates them and what part of the product they totally did not understand the way you intended it to work.

Features aren’t solutions, they’re responses to problems. The best features come from asking “why?” repeatedly when users tell you what they want. For example, they might ask for a dashboard, but what they really need is confidence their work is on track. In reality you can rarely ask humans “why?” five times. Instead, again, it is your job to think deeply enough and figure it out.

You don’t need formal user voting systems. Simply track how frequently something is requested and multiply by the impact it would have. But be careful with using this as the foundation for what you do—sometimes the most valuable improvements are ones nobody asks for because users don’t know they’re possible. This doesn’t mean they think it’s technically impossible, just very unlikely that you will actually implement it and so never mention it.

Always, always, listen to your users. Sometimes you need to do exactly what they say. But often, what they say is a second derivative of a true problem at best.

You can’t automate or outsource judgment.