Purchasing decisions based on feature checklists alone is dangerous when the stakes are high (i.e., big dollars on big enterprise software).

But feature checklist obsession isn't limited to big purchases, it's ubiquitous among all things technological.

Marco Arment has a nice little article about the obsession of tech press with the feature checklists of gadgets.

His post highlights two common feature excellence failures on product evaluation based on feature checklists as the key criteria: assumed equality, and miscomparison.

Definitely a worthwhile read.

Dan Frommer, of Business Insider, summarizes Tim Cook's talk at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference:

We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple's revenue last year was $40 billion. I think any other company that could say that is an oil company. That's not just saying yes to the right products, it's saying no to many products that are good ideas, but just not nearly as good as the other ones. I think this is so ingrained in our company that this hubris you talk about that happens to companies that are successful and sole role in life is to get bigger, I can tell you the management team at Apple would never let that happen. That's not what we're about. Small list of things to focus on.

So what's the moral of this quote?

If you look at the excerpt above that is in bold (emphasis was mine), Apple chooses to be better, not bigger.

This relates to my frequent rant about the absence of feature excellence in constantly growing feature checklists, especially in the BI realm.

Updated: Here's the audio recording of the discussion.

Lately, when talking to my fellow business intelligence compadres, I've been talking a lot about Feature Checklists and Feature Excellence, and the lack of the latter in enterprise software.

Feature Checklists

Feature checklists are self-explanatory. At the core, they're just lists of features. In the enterprise software space, software buyers are rarely subject matter experts. An IT manager is told to buy some business intelligence software by some business stakeholder, and in the absence of any business intelligence expertise, goes about researching the competitive landscape by using Google searches and creating a spreadsheet with a feature comparison grid. You can't blame buyers for that approach. We all do it.

The problem lies in the fact that product managers know about this behaviour. And more often than not, the difference between a won or lost deal is a few checkmarks in prospect's feature grid. It doesn't matter that the feature is poorly implemented or not, it just matters that the feature exists.

So it shouldn't be surprising that in many enterprise software companies, some guru in Marketing who scans the "blogosphere", "twitterverse" and God forbid, analyst publications, tells product management that the next release absolutely needs to include Feature X, Y and Z. The Product Development Manager will jump on some web sites to see how the competitors are doing it, and then get his or her team coding away. In the final release, you get the functionality that Marketing asked for, but more often than not, none of the new functionality is best in class, which leads to my next buzzword, feature excellence.

Feature Excellence

Feature excellence is exactly that. Excellence at delivering a particular software feature.

Feature excellence is easy to talk about, but hard to deliver. It often requires some deep thought, and consideration of users in the field. Excellence isn't only about technical efficiency, but also usability. Software with programmer's interfaces often fail on the usability criteria.

Feature checklists and feature excellence do not necessarily go hand in hand, especially in the world of enterprise software. In the consumer software world, money is made off of volume, so usability for the Joe Sixpacks of the world is critical. Even Microsoft, a company known to compete on feature checklists (the evolution of Office is a great example), can manage more than a few wins in the feature excellence column.

Feature excellence is much more elusive in the enterprise software market. Buyer emphasis on feature checklists definitely has more than a little to do with it.

Feature Checklists for Business Intelligence

Jumping back to the battle between feature checklists and feature excellence in the business intelligence world, a great example of this happened this past November, when visualization expert Stephen Few politely (and objectively) eviscerated an analyst article that provided a visualization "feature checklist" for potential business intelligence customers. The whole exchange was entertaining to me, because I'm known for my love of analysts (grin).

In any case, Stephen Few followed up recently with his own criteria for vendor selection. When you compare his list to the original analyst article, you can see that his list is steering buyers towards feature excellence, rather than feature checklists.

If more prospective buyers paid attention to the real subject matter experts and less to the opinion-mills that are analyst firms, then you'll see a shift in the industry towards providing feature excellence. Let's hope that happens.