Ways to Improve a Product | Inside Intercom
Source: https://blog.intercom.io/
Kaizen (??) is the philosophy of continuous improvement. Web businesses searching to find product market fit all follow some variation of Kaizen whether they know it or not. Shipping code doesn’t mean that you’re improving …
Adding New Features
New features expand the scope of the product, often making a big marketing splash, getting a version bump, and resulting in some press releases. Often the fanfare attracts new customers and new use-cases for the product. Typically, new features are the only improvements that outsiders (i.e. non-customers) will ever hear about.
New features are risky. You have to be very confident they will be valued, as they’re like children; you have to love them and support them no matter what.
Ask your customers “Would you like a [Calendar|TimeTracker|Gantt Chart]?” and they’ll reply yes. It’s a one-way “something or nothing” offer. They haven’t had to make a trade-off between competing priorities. This leads to customers saying they want stuff that they don’t really want.

Kaizen Guide: Better your business with continuous improvement
To be successful, you can’t make an improvement once and forget about it. Effective lean businesses use kaizen, which means “continuous improvement”. In kaizen, everyone looks for ways to improve processes on a daily basis. This Kaizen Guide explains the kaizen mindset, basic kaizen concepts including the PDCA cycle, and real-world examples.
Asking your customers “Would you rather that we made the product much faster, or that we added more labelling features?” and you’ll get a different answer. Everyone values speed. (Sidenote: Don’t you wish the Gmail team did this)
Improving existing features
– See more at: https://insideintercom.io/ways-to-improve-a-product/#sthash.aTm2xWLq.dpuf
Similar Posts:
- Quality is a Matter of Customer Focus
- Beginners Guide to Lean
- What is a Kaizen event?
- Theory of Constraints: Part 4
- Resistance to Change in LEAN and How to Overcome it
- 10 Commandments to Continuous Improvement
- Is Apple Lean?
- Waste – Not Good for Customer Satisfaction
Additional Resources
- Social Distancing Tools: Wall And Floor Signs– creativesafetysupply.com
- Process Cycle Efficiency (PCE)– creativesafetysupply.com
- Three Ways To Cut Non-Value Adding Processes From Your Business– blog.creativesafetysupply.com
- The Top 5 Ways To Implement & Improve Lean Efforts in the Workplace– blog.5stoday.com
- These Are The Best Ways To Improve Your Lean Efforts– 5snews.com
- Vinyl Chart Tape – Ways To Improve Your Workplace– safetyblognews.com
- How To Improve The Effectiveness Of Your Kaizen Efforts– kaizen-news.com
- No Problem is a Problem– jakegoeslean.com
- Using Kaizen…to Eat Sushi?– iecieeechallenge.org