There are four kinds of feature that we put in a product or service: Functional, acquisition, onboarding, and market development. But while good product managers know what to build, and great ones know whatnotto build, few know how to balance the four kinds of feature to match the growth and challenges of the company.

• Functional features are those your current customers need. Many of them are easy to figure out, if you’re listening, through focus groups, feedback forms, even search results. They’re features that form the core of your product or service, and satisfy the needs of the customers you have (and the prospects like them.)
• Acquisition features help you acquire prospects. Dropbox, for example, created a system where existing users could invite new ones and earn free storage for both themselves and the new user. This took development work: time to design, code, and test.
• Onboarding features help move users up the learning curve by gradually introducing them to functionality and easing them into more advanced functions. When a player starts playing World of Warcraft, the interface is simple. They seem a clean screen with few buttons, and a person with an exclamation mark over their head. It’s clear what they should do next; the first quest they get is a simple one. As they advance in the game, the quests—and interfaces—become more complex. By the final levels, the screen is covered with buttons and plugins, and dozens of players litter the screen.
• Market development features help the business reframe the product and explore new markets, by offering functionality that gives the company a reason to talk to a new set of customers or get people to think about the product differently. Market development features don’t seem like a high priority to existing customers, and are often discounted or delayed as a result. For example, the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser is melamine foam, which started out as aircraft noise insulation, but P&G changed the packaging and sizing in a way that allowed it to explore an entirely unrelated market: housecleaning.

Balancing the four features

Every product manager needs to look at their product roadmap through the lenses of function, acquisition, onboarding, and market development.

I wish I’d reviewed every product roadmap with this perspective. Onboarding, acquisition, and market exploration don’t happen by themselves. They require software development and integration.

If you’re not including the time and effort they will take in your schedules, you’re lying to yourself. But if you treat onboarding, acquisition, and exploration with the same amount of planning and discipline that you do functional features, you’ll be far ahead of the competition.