Nobody Wants Your Feature. They Want the Problem Gone.
A man walks into a hardware store and asks for a quarter-inch drill bit.
The salesperson shows him four. Sizes, materials, prices, cases.
Then a second salesperson asks, “What are you making?”
“A shelf. My wife has been asking since March.”
Now the second salesperson is selling something different: a shelf, up on the wall, before the weekend.
(This is a well-known marketing story in different versions. We’re telling it our way.)
He never wanted the bit. He wanted the shelf, and an end to the nagging.
Why do features fail?
A feature describes the product. An outcome describes the customer’s life afterward.
People don’t skip features because they’re dumb. They skip them because they have to do the translation themselves, and most won’t.
Every feature on your page is an unfinished sentence. “Real-time sync” ends with “so that...” and your job is to finish it.
The translation method
For each feature, ask three questions in order.
So what? Real-time sync means the data is the same everywhere.
So what does that change for them? Nobody sends the wrong version of a spreadsheet.
What will they notice? The Monday morning argument about whose number is right stops happening.
The third answer is the one to write. It’s visible, ordinary, and something a person can picture.
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