We used to build features for customers.

These days, it can feel like engineers and designers are clocking in at a feature factory. A conveyor belt optimized for output ahead of customer pains. 

Tools and automation have emerged to help them take features from design to deployment faster than ever. Or to “Done”, as issue trackers call it.

But features aren’t done when they’re deployed. That’s when customers see them for the first time! It’s the most important time in a feature’s lifecycle but it’s also when we drop attention.

Modern practices preach releasing features quickly, reviewing them with customers, and then iterating.

But in most companies, there’s no follow-through and customers end up with scoped-down features that don’t do it for them.

With such an approach, it’s not surprising that 50% of all features fail to make a customer impact in the first iteration. It’s nuts!

Maybe customer success will pick up negative feedback, but it’s too slow and by that time, the customers are already dissatisfied.

Similarly, product analytics is rooted in product-level lagging indicators that feature teams can’t immediately influence.

What engineers and designers can act on are leading indicators, like feature awareness, adoption, satisfaction, and feedback. And, they need a workflow to surface these indicators in a repeatable way that’s as automated as possible for each feature release.

Only then will engineers and designers truly become data-driven and customer-centric.

Fast-moving companies get this. They hire product engineers and product designers - and fewer PMs - and expose them to customer feedback, so they can iterate and address issues themselves, fast.

But how do they actually achieve it? Consistently getting leading indicators to engineers and designers is a ton of manual work. Some hire new roles, like ProductOps, to facilitate this feedback loop.

We believe the problem isn’t a people problem but a tooling problem. No-one has built a feature management tool for rapid iteration. A feature management tool that goes beyond the release and empowers iteration. Release to some, get feedback, iterate accordingly, and then release to everyone..

Bucket’s mission is to empower engineers and designers in B2B companies to build and release better features.