5. Feature Audit

Find out which features are used, and in which proportion

What is a Feature Audit?

Features Audit is an easy but powerful product management tool to map your features. It helps discover the features to develop or improve and focus on that matter. The idea is to take your current product, analyze feature usage and plot it on a graph:

  • The horizontal axis consists in the % of your users using this feature
  • The vertical axis consists in the frequency at which a feature was used

How to use it

In a feature audit, you choose how to treat a feature with limited adoption. You have four options:

1️⃣  You can remove the feature from your product

2️⃣ You can increase the adoption rate to make sure more customers discover a feature

3️⃣ You can increase the frequency with which customers are using the feature

4️⃣ You can improve the feature

Where to Focus

Any features that are in the top right section of the graph should be your priority. These are features that all users are using, meaning they are all aware of this feature. Also all these users are using this feature all the time, meaning they see the value of the feature. This feature is the core reason that customers love your product. If you can make improvements here, it will delight all of your customers.

Yet, if you make a change perceived badly by customers, then this is pretty bad news. Here is a core part of their workflow or reason for using your product and you've made it worse. So, make these features better if you can, but do so with great caution. Test changes here in a small bucket of users first - say 5% of users or less.

Where to Experiment

The Feature Audit template gives you pointers for what may be great places to run experiments. If some users are using a feature, then how can we get them all to use a feature? If the users who do use it use it a lot, then there is a good chance that other customers would use it.

Perhaps they are not aware of this feature and how great it could be for them? Some messaging (an in-app message, an email etc) could explain why this feature has great value? This could be a quick experiment to run! If you see users using the feature at least once but not a lot, then you know customers are aware of the feature. After all, they have used it.

Although they know the feature exists, they didn't see the value of using it more often. Explaining the value of the feature could be  effective and make another experiment.

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