Features Not Made Equal

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Dima poses that every product feature falls on one side of a "hygiene bar," and he and Slava explore where that line sits, how it shifts over time, and whether the idea can become more than his own intuition.

• Ranking every feature on one universal scale assumes they're commensurable, which is rarely true
• Jim McCarthy's five feature categories(from Dynamics of Software Development): strategic, competitive, customer satisfaction, innovation, paradigmatic
• Other models pointing at similar asymmetries. For example, the Kano model and Terry Hill's order qualifiers and order winners

• Dima crystalises this into the idea of a hygiene bar. Below the bar, a missing feature penalizes the product but having it earns little. Above the bar, features differentiate, but only once the product already clears the bar
• Hygiene bar is an expression of the market. Shifting hygiene bar allows to trace how market evolves. E.g. Command strips moved the market of "means of hanging things on walls"
• McCarthy's categories and the hygiene bar: strategic and customer-satisfaction features sit below the bar, competitive features sit above it, and investment features stay neutral until a later release. Paradigmatic features are the odd one out: they move the existing bar, pushing new requirements onto competitors.

"Apples are apples — you can't make a paradigm shift with an apple as a product." — Dima