The need for a hurdle
Lets say you’re working on a software project; something new, some never-seen-before app that will change the way things are done.
At some point, you’re going to ask yourself, what features should I add? What should I be working on? You’re going to be determining your priorities.
The common approach is to ask your clients or userbase what they would like to see in the next version. There are many good sites that do this (uservoice.com, ideascale.com, and crowdsound.com are a few), and you’d basically be crowd-sourcing your product management / feature development.
In an enterprise setting, the process is somewhat similar. The sales guy call his lead up and does his sales technique. If the sale goes through, fine, but if not, he tells his boss. His boss then asks him why he didn’t sell, and he turns around and asks the lead why he didn’t land the sale. Lead then responds something along the lines of “your product didn’t have feature X”. Boss then makes a report, and sends it to engineering, which then implements feature X.
This method has a clear fault: leads can and will respond with all sorts of excuses to end the conversation. You then end up building your product on whatever your leads come up with to stop talking to your sales team, and this is how bloatware is born.
There needs to be a counter-force to suggesting a feature. A cost of sorts.
If you start out solving your own problem, then all is well. You only do the essential stuff, what counts to you, because you bear the cost yourself. But after a while, your own problems are fixed, and you move on to fix other people’s problems.
The cost can be anything, but energy expenditure is a good way to determine whether there is cost at all. This energy expenditure can be time. Development resources (sending in a patch), or time working with you on a solution. Or it can be financial. From $10 (or even $1) for individuals, to thousands of dollars for companies.
Since there is a drawback to suggesting a bugfix or creating a new feature, you avoid entirely the stuff nobody wants. And the stuff you really need, you’ll find someone willing to shell out the $10 for the feature. If you have a freemium (free + premium) business model, you may want to suggest going to a higher pricing tier in exchange for development of said feature.
For those who want to know about the theoretical underpinning of this, it is part of my Master’s Thesis research on the Handicap Principle from evolutionary biology applied to Signal Oriented Marketing. It studies how trust emerges among mutually distrustful individuals through specific types of signals. These signals that establish trust are Honest Signals, in the form of handicaps. Like why you would buy a $10 hammer with a lifetime warranty, even though it will never be worth your time sending in a complaint for a refund. Or why witches have long noses, and clowns have round ones. Or why we wear ties at formal gatherings, but bowties in state dinners.