Should product teams build 'nice-to-have' features given their true costs and benefits?
4 recorded positions from 3 people, first said May 11, 2022. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Nice to haves cost more and return less than expected so avoid them
Dan Siroker · May 15, 2024
Every feature you ship is an open-ended commitment rather than a finished task — 'no good deed goes unpunished'
He has never seen a case where shipping a small feature was the end of it; edge cases and one-off requests always follow, so founders must weigh maintenance cost, not just build cost
62:28 20VC: Fundraising Wisdom that is Total BS; Dilution, Meeting Associates, Taking the Highest Price, Always Be Raising | Why Second Time Founders Are More Investable & Why Not To Hire People Out of College with Dan Siroker, CEO @ Limitless
Mike Hudack · Sep 13, 2024
You are essentially never allowed nice-to-haves in product; the instinct should be not to build them and to build something that creates meaningful user value instead
You have to count the cost to build, cost to maintain, cost to explain to users, and the opportunity cost of what else that team and mindshare could have created
Scope: depends on what you mean by nice-to-have
14:50 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack
Mike Hudack · Sep 13, 2024
Everything that is nice-to-have has a higher cost than you anticipate and returns lower value than you expect
Learned over years; his own earlier prioritization was too permissive about nice-to-haves
16:50 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack
Also on the record
Tony Fadell · May 11, 2022
The custom-designed Nest screwdriver should stay in every product box because its brand and marketing value outweighs the cost savings the data argues for
The screwdriver was marketing and a signal of the brand's care, creating intangible brand value visible in customer conversations, YouTube videos and installations that can never show up on the COGs line
10:18 Brand and marketing value of a nice to have can outweigh cost data against it
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 4 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.