So, it was 8am this morning I got a ticket support email from a customer that we had promised to deliver a feature for.  Not good!

I realized that  I should have knuckled down and got the job done within a few days but being over 1 week later the feature was already travelling further and further down our priority list.

The feature wasn’t as crucial as others but I noticed that the customer pressure I had on my mind, and the thought of possibly upsetting a current customer or possibly even losing that customer led me to focus much more and get it completed in much shorter time.

I was more Agile and I got a buzz from the anticipated kudos I would get from the customer loving their newly added feature. Added just for them! Don’t misunderstand me, the feature was of benefit to all our customers, but to that customer it was theirs.

This has real benefits for me too. I got the job-done satisfaction of creating a new feature (adding value) to our service and therefore adding value to all our customers.

I now have a new eager advocate for our business who is more loyal to our service than before, because they were satisfied, but also more importantly because they contributed.

That contribution or vested interest is super important for generating sustainable growth. So the customer in question then becomes a promoter of your brand or service, who would more readily recommend you to their peer network and beyond.

It’s so simple it’s brilliant. But as developers & entrepreneurs with limited time, we need to be careful of feature creep and be careful of over promising when you can’t deliver.

So what do I propose then?

Let’s say you have a plan for introducing a range of new features and updates to your SaaS service or product. Just send them out on an email to customers and ask them to vote on which ones they would like to see implemented.

Then work through the most important or the most popular ones, but get them all done anyway. The voting process will have an effect of creating the vested interest I spoke of earlier. Like any of the reality voting TV programmes – people will have their favorites and they love to be right! So let them be right!

Later on, thank them for suggesting the feature and tell them when it’s done!