The Feature Company
Bucket is currently focused on feature ownership and continuous feature evaluation, but, we plan to launch more feature-focused products in the future. This post describes why we're building our company around the feature object.
Modern companies are software companies, and many of them sell products on subscription. For subscription-based companies, monthly active customers along with growth and churn rates are the key performance indicators.
Modern software companies are agile and constantly evolving their products. Improve or die, to be dramatic. What this looks like on the inside of the company is several - or hundreds - of feature teams continuously prioritizing and planning what to work on next.
Essentially, each feature team is deciding between two options for every new feature cycle: Build a brand new feature or iterate on an existing live feature.
Feature teams are formed - designers, engineers, product managers - and they spend weeks, months or years crafting a new feature release. Once the feature is implemented and tested, the company coordinates internally and the feature is released.
Features are celebrated at release time. And understandably so. It takes a small village and several months to get any key feature from idea to release. Which, by the way, often amounts to a $100,000+ feature investment.
But, it’s really way too early to celebrate. The feature is still only in its life-cycle infancy and isn’t a success with its target customers yet.
During the feature’s life-cycle, multiple organizations in the company - engineering, product, marketing, sales, support and management - will be deeply focused on this particular feature at different stages.
Are customers adopting the feature?
Do they keep using it after the initial try, or do they churn away?
Are customers even aware that this feature exists?
Is this feature impactful in terms of buying decisions?
Are there new upsell opportunities because of this feature?
Is the feature generating too many support tickets?
These are questions modern companies ask themselves every day and yet the feature doesn’t actually have a home. Bucket is the home of the feature and where these all organizations within the company will go to ask these questions per feature.
Bucket is the Feature company.