A Story Of Life On Loosing Change (part 1)

In my early years in Dubai, I'd consistently find myself short of one thing.

And not having it got me into a number of awkward daily-life situations.

That thing was...

Loose Change

‍

I know it sounds embarrassing. But hey, it's true.

This week I'll be doing a 3-part post on this.

‍

Tales of Loose Change: Chapter 1

I was working from Bayt's office on a summer afternoon. After editing a drab spec for hours, my groggy brain protested that it needed a break.

I got up. Stretched. And decided to go down to BlueMart to pick up something to munch on.

When I got there, I didn't find anything appetizing. So, I just picked up a stick of gum thinking it might keep me alert for the rest of the day.

It was a busy time at the mart. I got in a long line to pay.

When I got my turn, I placed the gum on the counter, whipped out my wallet & out came a solitary 100 dirham bill.

The cashier lady looked at my gum, then me, the bill & then the line.

"Sorry, we don't have change.", she blurted.

People behind me were waiting with carts full of stuff. I felt small with my little stick of gum. Judgmental looks.

In that moment of panic, I looked around for something useful that I'd need anyway.

Me: "Can you also give me Etisalat (phone) credit of AED 20?"

Cashier: "No, still, not enough change" (she caught on what I was doing)

Me: "AED 50?"

Cashier: "No, not enough change."

Me: "Fine, AED 75!" (with auction-like poise)

Cashier: "OK" (grudgingly)

Phew. Loose change kept me humble. Again.

—

This reminded me of my time at Talentera (applicant tracking system).

We had a client that just wanted the career site portion of our ATS product.

But to get that, we had to sell them the recruiter backend as well.

It wasn't a useless investment though. The CVs collected on the career site were made searchable in the recruiter view, so it was inevitably going to be used. But we had to train them hard on that.

‍

This brings me to 2 product topics:

1- Feature factories

Do your customers need all the features you sell them?

Probably, no.

In fact, Pendo's research shows up to 80% of features never or rarely get used.

If 80% of dev payroll is being spent on rarely used features, that sounds like a massive waste of investment.

But sometimes it's by design.

Admin features like data backup or reverting to a previous spreadsheet version are infrequently used functions but still essential.

In other cases, it's either:

• Feature bloat (indicates poor discovery & is a nominee for being discarded)
• Lack of user education (indicates need for better onboarding & training)

2- Product bundling

This is the art of packaging the right features together.

If you don't have a lightweight offering, you'll risk losing the downstream market that doesn't need so many features.

But if you don't bundle, your thin offering is more churn-prone & you also lose hooks to upsell.

Lesson: Learn why users buy your product & adapt.