How to 10x customers’ willingness to pay: A guide to feature constellations | Aleks Bass, CPO @ Typeform
Some feature sets are an order of magnitude more valuable together than the sum of their parts.
When Aleks Bass joined Typeform as CPO, she set the team on an aggressive user research agenda. She was looking to fix what was seen as a lack of cohesive product strategy to reinvigorate their slowing growth. What she didn’t expect to find was the secret to unlocking growth in “feature constellations”: sets of features that, when combined, can 10x customer willingness to pay.
Feature constellations became the foundation of their fastest-growing product in company history: Typeform for Growth.
For the whole story, check out our LaunchPod episode where Aleks details the entire research and build process:
Here’s how they did it, and how you can reveal your product’s feature constellations.
1. What are feature constellations?
Feature constellations are sets of features that, when combined, solve a complete workflow and deliver far more value than any one of the features does alone.
For example, Typeform’s forms allowed people to submit video responses. But reviewing these video responses was labor-intensive and didn’t scale for customers. However, when paired with an AI analysis tool that pulled key themes from the video responses, value increased exponentially:
“Video answers had a decent willingness to pay. But when combined with AI analysis of themes and sentiment, all of a sudden, those two capabilities together had a much higher willingness to pay.”
Not only did the value for customers grow, but this feature constellation also made the company more revenue:
“We found that when you combine these two features, [customers are] willing to pay 5x, or even 10x what they would for each individual feature. Because you're streamlining the workflow, you're unlocking additional value.”
2. How to find your own feature constellations
Aleks and her team uncovered high-impact bundles through structured research:
Step 1: Pull everything onto the table
The team collected over 80 features and capabilities from a wide range of sources: customer success, sales, marketing, product managers, their various survey tools, and more.
Then they made sure that they were articulated clearly, in a way that the customer base could clearly understand.
Step 2: Ask customers to prioritize
The team focused broadly to start: anybody looking for form-like software. They wanted to know who they were, why they were using the software, what they were doing with it, what their budget was, and what their biggest pain points were with current form tools.
Then, they used a MaxDiff survey to force prioritization and tradeoffs across the ~80 features and capabilities uncovered above. Users were shown several variations of subsets of this feature set repeatedly. Each time, they were asked to determine:
The relative value of each feature compared to others on the list
A value score per feature
Willingness to pay
Aleks details the full process here.
Step 3: Determine major customer groups and pick a focus
The team then used these MaxDiff findings to determine three major customer groups:
People who are doing lead generation-like activities (Marketers)
People who are doing talent acquisition-like activities (Recruiters)
People who are doing feedback, market research, customer experience, types of activities (Researchers)
Across those three groups, 75% of feature needs were overlapping. But 25% were different.
One complication, though, was that they found each group required a different maturity level of the overlapping features to find true value in them. The better a need was already met for the group, the more maturity and completeness they needed from a capability to derive value.
Budget sizes also affected willingness to pay. In the end, Marketers had a relatively high willingness to pay for the lowest maturity of solutions. They typically had higher budgets, and their needs were found to be the most unmet around the most important feature areas.
Step 4: Spot natural feature pairings
Finally, researchers at Typeform ran analyses on the data around willingness to pay and prioritization.
Patterns emerged where the prioritization and willingness to pay for certain features both increased when they were ranked with certain other features. This was consistent when these feature sets were shown in the same group for ranking, but priority and willingness to pay dropped when they were with other features.
This was because, upon deeper inspection, these features were found to unlock a complete workflow when combined. Analysis proved that the features, alone, had a fine willingness to pay and priority score. But, when grouped, priority and willingness to pay increased 5x to 10x.
For example, Typeform had released video answers, where respondents could submit a video answer. These video answers had a decent willingness to pay, but when combined with an AI analysis of themes and sentiment, all of a sudden, those two capabilities together had a much higher willingness to pay.
“Because if I'm getting 50 to 100 videos without any ability to really extract context [or] analyze them at scale, I'm left watching 50 to 100 videos, which makes me feel like that's going to be extra work. It's still valuable, it's just not quite as valuable as layering additional capabilities that then help me extract that true value from that video question capability in the form. There were a few of these interesting feature constellations that helped us from a prioritization standpoint.”
3. How to nail what you deliver
To build the right things, you need to:
Know who you’re building for
Know what you’re building
Verify you’re building the right thing in the right way
The first two are accomplished from the MaxDiff research done prior, as well as honing this understanding with user interviews to more deeply understand.
But, the last one? This requires continuous usability testing throughout the development lifecycle.
And don’t just track clicks, talk to users:
“The click-through data is only going to give us small percentages of information. The context we get from having real conversations with humans improves our abilities to solve their problems tenfold.”
Run continuous user and usability tests and ask:
Does this meet your needs?
What do you expect this button to do?
How do you imagine this experience unfolding?
Does this meet minimum requirements of usability?
Where are the traps?
Where can we improve?
Takeaways
Isolated features check boxes. Feature constellations unlock workflows and serious business value.
They helped Typeform shift from fragmented priorities to launching one of their most successful products.
Next time you build a roadmap, don’t just ship a feature. Ship a constellation.