Here’s a universal truth: There is no free lunch.
No matter how you see the world, there is always a cost. There are costs to starting a business, building a product even having lunch with someone.
When building a product and validating ideas and features, the thing to keep in mind is the cost.
Several costs are immediately apparent:
- Building Cost
- Launching Cost
- Tradeoff Cost
- Maintenance Cost
- Sunsetting Cost.
There are more, but for now, let’s briefly review these five.
Building Cost
A rather self-explanatory one. How much will it cost to build this feature? We can measure this in time (man hours) and resources (tools and infrastructure). In software, the time component is often misunderstood and poorly predicted. How long will something take to build is the question most often posed by the bigwigs in the business.
It is an easy question to ask, of course, but an impossible one to answer. We usually can’t predict how long things will take, so we have to ballpark it. Look at your history of building software. Find similar projects and use their timeframes to help you estimate building costs.
Resources are a little bit easier to estimate because they usually have fixed costs. CI/CD pipeline and tools to support it have a fixed monthly cost per user. Software development tools have a similar cost structure.
While it is easier to estimate the resource cost, there is a hidden component here. Setup time for the resources. How long will it take to set up the infrastructure to build the product and take it to production?
Launching Cost
Similar to building cost, launching cost describes the amount of time and resources you will need to put your product feature into production. It could be as quick as pushing the latest code into the pipeline and having it deployed to an existing production environment. It could also be as slow as having to set up the whole environment and the pipeline to begin with.
It could be somewhere in between, where the cost of launching the new code is small, but the cost of moving the data around or changing its structure could be astronomical.
Tradeoff Cost
How much will this new feature take away focus from other aspects of the product? Will this feature take prominence and change the whole problem-solution space? This kind of change could affect the product-market fit and push existing customers out.
Whenever you are validating features, think about this cost. The tradeoff between two features could trigger a pivot for the company and change the business model. It could be a good thing, but it could also lead to unintended circumstances.
Maintenance Cost
Who will be responsible for making this feature work well? Are there specific customer support guides that need to be developed? How much will it cost to keep existing data easily accessible? Will we need a budget to accommodate future growth? What happens if there is a disaster and we need to recover the product and the data?
These are some of the examples of the maintenance costs. During the validation phase of production feature development, few product managers think this far ahead. And if you haven’t found a product market fit, this should not be a high priority.
But if you have an established product, maintenance costs must be discussed and validated to ensure that the business can support them.
Sunsetting Cost
No one wants to think about sunsetting the costs of their products. Yet, all products go through this phase. Sunsetting a product could require time and resources dedicated to disposing of the data properly or according to some legal requirements. It could require asset liquidation or the breaking of contracts. It could require customer communication and the building of data export and transfer tools to help preserve customer data.
This cost could apply to the whole product or to one customer. For example, when a customer leaves, she might need to have all these things handled for her in order to stay compliant with federal regulations.
Are there sunsetting costs for your product feature idea? Give it a brief thought and write it down. You may not need it now, but it’s good to have your brain thinking about these things.