How important is that feature?
Great piece by Ken Norton of Google Ventures on feature importance isn’t just linear, but is often order-of-magnitude different: Babe Ruth and Feature Lists. Ken provides a clear example of how the most important feature may be way, way more important than the second or third one.
Also, though, one thing bothered me a bit about the article. While formatting was the most important feature in this case, the product wouldn’t have been the product without its collaboration features. While “Sharing” and “Commenting” were on the list of feature priorities Ken includes, it didn’t seem like collaboration in general was. Was that because collaboration was mostly solved by this point? As most people now know, collaboration was the killer feature of Google Docs…the ability to edit a single doc without having copies everywhere is what made the tool something that MS Word wasn’t. To this day Google Docs is all about collaboration…and its formatting is still far below what one would expect from a native word processing app.