Why you’re clueless after shipping product — and how Bucket helps
One of the privileges of working at Creandum is that we get to join founders for their journey, and get to know and collaborate with them through the twists and turns. The impact of this is that, when they are ready to start something new, we know they mean business. And they know Creandum is a partner who will be there when it matters.
It’s nearly five years since Rasmus and Ron sold their last company Opbeat to Elastic. Creandum was a proud seed investor of the company, and we saw the founders go on to experience hyperscale as Elastic grew across the world and eventually IPO’d.
And here we are again. The same co-founders are now ready for another rodeo, and also this time with Creandum by their side! World, meet Bucket — the feature company!
Blindly building product
It almost sounds ridiculous when you say it like this, but the fundamental of day to day product development is adding and improving features.
Today, software companies assemble engineers, designers and PMs around the scope of “One feature at a time”. They spend months scoping, designing, and building a new feature. The end of such work is then celebrated when the team eventually ships said feature, announcing this at a townhall and newsletter.
Meanwhile, someone in product analytics is reviewing the big picture and may look at conversion rates, active users, monetization or other “product aggregate” metrics to understand any impact on the product’s overall performance.
Bucket Co-founder, Rasmus puts it this way:
“I don’t actually think there’s any “hand over” from feature team to product analytics team. Often, the analytics people just aren’t in tune with what features are being released. They just report on aggregate numbers.”
“Sometimes they may do ad-hoc deep dives on a certain feature, but that’s flaky and inconsistent. And often, these ad-hoc reports are impossible to compare as they’re done by different people, use different definitions and look different.”
“We want to take the ad-hoc feature analysis and make it a consistent, repeatable, natural extension of the current product development workflow. For anyone to successfully do this, the product has to be treating features as a first-class citizen.”
The challenge here is that product analytics is an abstract of the entirety of your product. There are many reasons why conversion rates may change. How much of that is tied to the latest feature launch? How many of your users actually used that feature? And how do users who use that feature differ in their behaviour from others who don’t?
Plain and simple: does the feature have the business impact it was intended to have? You don’t really know. You operate in the dark.
And maybe even more importantly, why does the team of engineers, designers and PMs celebrate shipping the feature and move on? Why are they not held accountable that the feature delivers the intended results it was designed for?
How can the work be done when the feature is shipped, vs when the feature delivers the intended results? How much can they improve the feature post initial release, if they aren’t also held accountable for perfecting and optimizing that same feature?
Fundamentally: if you work in Features but think in Product, you’re always going to have a disconnect that threatens your ability to understand and improve success clearly. This brings us to Bucket.
Building with Bucket
Bucket is designed to bring product workflows and decision-making down to the feature level, repairing the void between ownership and tracking. This creates the opportunity for features to live longer in scope, as teams learn where and how to prioritise their efforts for maximum iterative impact.
With Bucket, companies no longer celebrate shipping a new feature (which in all honesty is vanity) but rather celebrate feature success.
With Bucket you also bring a level of transparency to engineers and PMs. It’s no longer about submitting code, but it’s in fact about submitting the code that actually has the most optimal and intended impact. This is like turning the light on for product development that has been operating in the dark for so long.
Bucket’s Rasmus again:
“It helps engineering managers prioritize their resources. What should the 500 engineers be working on the next month? New features or fixing existing broken features? Now they finally know.”
Product conquers all
This company really hits home for us. At Creandum, we believe True Product Conquers All. If product isn’t the answer, you’re asking the wrong questions.
So when a pair of great founders we already know, who have just spent half a decade picking up scaleup experience at one of the most successful public tech companies tell us feature success is the future of product love, we listen. You should too.
Today we’re incredibly proud to announce that Creandum has led the pre-seed round into Bucket and we cannot wait to see the magic Rasmus and Ron will create as they redefine modern product {feature} development.
