It’s frustrating when people confuse ideas with features. While it sounds like an obvious difference, it’s one of the larger sources of tension in product development.

Over the past year, I’ve seen cases where an idea had a 0% conversion rate with one implementation and a 5% paid conversion rate with another. Of course, the 5% wouldn’t have been possible without the idea. But a 0 vs 5% conversion rate can make or break a company. The implementation added 100% of the value.

The confusion begins when someone champions a idea masquerading as a feature. For example, say that we have a website that sells a system of raising a perfect dog. Your partner has an idea for a feature. He pitches it as a system of ranking puppy choices using a combination of color, hairiness, and bark pitch. He wants you to build it yesterday.

The problem is that currently this “feature” is literally 0% done. Without an implementation, code, a page flow, metrics and conversions, the feature is actually an idea.

What the person is really saying is “I want our product to include this idea and I want it to increase the rate at which people pay us.”

What’s an idea?

Ideas are very similar to goals. When I say “let’s make a feature to recommend dogs to people based on their interests,” what I’m really saying is “I think it would be valuable if we had a feature to recommend dogs that worked well and converted.”

The hard part is realizing that the actual feature is 0% done. Nothing is successful yet. All the work of making the feature a success hasn’t happened yet. Ideas are value-less without an actual feature-implementation.

What’s a feature?

Features can be thought of in terms of actual web pages. Features have to take into consideration everything that ideas don’t, like how to motivate customers to actually use the feature, how to make it clear what the feature is, how to integrate it in without changing the engagement/conversion metrics of existing features , how to improve it over time, how to measure whether it is a success, and how to get it released quickly.

For example, adding in a new feature could drop the conversion rate and usage of another feature, unless they are both re-implemented. Ideas don’t have to take this into account.

Deciding whether an idea is good or not has to take into account what kind of features it could be implemented as.

My experience with product development hammered this into me over and over again over the past year. Simply the placement of a link can make 5x differences in the usage of a feature. 5x is a make or break multiplier, in terms of whether a feature succeeds or not. The success or failure of the feature often has absolutely nothing to do with the original idea.

Avoiding idea overload

If you can accept that ideas are goals that are 0% complete and that implementation makes or breaks features, then the cost of ideas becomes apparent. For each idea that you take on as a goal, you have to commit to making it successful. This means accepting that everything that you have’t yet thought of will make the difference between whether the idea ends up being seen as good or bad 3 months later. Things like:

—email subjects

—text changes

—link placement

—button copy

—button placement

—page flow

—relationship to other features

all have the power to decide the fate of a feature. These things all take time to test and tweak. Furthermore, in order to learn what is actually going on, you’ll have to isolate these changes by user. Unless you have a user base the size of Zynga or Google, this means spending at least a week running just the initial test so that you can see what mechanics make the feature tick. All of this takes several weeks or months.

Choose a few ideas, then focus on implementation and be patient

An idea typically takes several months to turn a profit. Each idea, in order to be made successful, has to have large amounts of time devoted to deal with all of the human parts of how to release it and make it valuable for customers.

Ideas, then, are best thought of as goals, not features. Each goal takes time to turn a profit, and sucks up resources in the meantime.

An idea without a working page flow should always be considered 0% done. The less ideas you try to implement, the more chances you have to make each one successful.