Identifying the Business Value of What We Do

Identifying the Business Value of What We Do: "A Simple Trick: Take It Away

How do we tell what the contribution of registration is to our business? One simple trick is to play with the idea of taking it away.

If we removed the registration process entirely from the site, what would the effects be? Well, because almost everyone who uses it is frustrated, we’d be eliminating their frustration right off. And it probably wouldn’t cost too much to just pull it off the site.

However, what would we lose? Would the absence of new names hurt our marketing efforts? Would it make customer service more difficult? Could we quantify what the long-term effects of the lost functionality would be?

Often the simple exercise of pretending to remove the functionality and looking for the downstream effects can help us understand how important a feature is to our business. With a little research on the feature’s impact, we can start to quantify the true value of the functionality. This trick doesn’t always work, but when it does, it can be extremely insightful."