When looking at potential projects you can find a few common shapes:
Low value | high cost → AKA mistakes
Low value | low cost → AKA why bother
High value | high cost → AKA core roadmap items
High value | low cost → AKA low-hanging fruit
As a result of being high value and low cost, low-hanging fruit is some of the most desired work for an organization. It is, however, hard to find low-hanging fruit if you aren’t regularly and deliberately looking for it.
This guide seeks to provide paths that can yield low-hanging fruit opportunities.
8 ways to find low-hanging fruit:
1) Find the friction
Why it works:
Most problems in your product will not be reported by end users unless they are leading to the total failure (or significant breakdown) of a feature.
As a result, there’s a very good chance that your product has friction in some key places that are invisible to you but highly disruptive to your users.
If you find and unblock those pathways and you’ll see a higher fraction of users performing actions successfully. Do this for an important enough pathway and you’ve found a big win.
How to look for it:
Start by thinking of the most important actions that happen in your product, then try to identify any points of friction in the process of performing those actions.
Ask yourself “Would people reasonably understand the path to take?”, “Is the feature slow, is load time an issue?”, “Is it a big pain to get from point A to B with this feature?” and “Does this experience suck?” to find potential improvement areas.
Additionally, look at recordings, do a few feature walkthroughs yourself, look at feature data, talk to customers about it, run usability testing or feature walkthrough sessions, and/or map a funnel for the feature if possible as these can help uncover those points of friction.
2) Find a small win for the biggest possible audience
Why it works:
Big wins are generally much harder to find than small wins.
There are more small wins out there than big wins.
It is, often times, easier to find a small win for a big population than a big win on a small population (or a big win on a big population). A small win on a big population will, often times, have the same effect as a big win on a small population.
It is therefore an effective strategy to try to identify small wins on the broadest population possible as these will be easier to find and likely to yield big effects on your product and users.
How to look for it:
Look for areas of your product that experience a great deal of traffic or that substantial portions of your population rely on. Focus on identifying small potential ways to significantly improve those areas.
Ask yourself “What are some ways we can improve efficiency by 1-10%?”, “What’s the easiest and cheapest way to make a massive improvement without significantly changing the product we have today?”, or “What’s the clearest no-brainer improvement we can make?” to start identifying these areas.
3) Find the hidden bug in a core system
Why it works:
The longer a system has existed and the more other systems leverage it, the more likely there are hidden issues with it or with the systems that rely on it.
Similarly to looking for friction, finding and removing the hidden disruption in a high-leverage system will often create many positive outcomes.
In many cases, teams will inadvertently build solutions around broken features. By solving critical bugs you can remove that unnecessary overhead and make your system more reliable in the process.
How to look for it:
Think about your critical systems and assume there’s something wrong with them. Subsequently, spend time trying to “break” the feature to see if you can identify issues.
Ask yourself “If this feature is broken, why would we not know?”, “What are the worst ways this feature could be broken?”, and “What part of this feature does no one really know how it works” to find potential leads.
Additionally, spend time with your team and other internal stakeholders of the feature and try to dig for any known issues or concern areas that might exist. Stakeholders can often guide you in fruitful directions as they’ll have a strong understanding of the feature as well as fears about how it could fail.
4) Find the biggest expenses
Why it works:
The longer a 3rd party exists in your system the likelier it is that you’re overusing it without realizing it.
Cost problems tend to compound over time as teams can grow to leverage the third party in inefficient ways or turbocharge expenditures accidentally.
If your business doesn’t do a good job cleaning 3rd party bills or have effective expenditure monitoring, then you’re likely to find many wins around cost-cutting and making your business more profitable.
How to look for it:
Take all the expenses your business has, especially the expenses related to software and 3rd party tools (think about any feature that leverages a third-party system that charges at a fixed (or better yet variable) rate).
Map all those expenses in a spreadsheet along with the cost, billing cycles, any variables that you control, the usage data for that feature, and the qualitative importance of the feature.
Once you have that list in place, start with the highest-order expenses and work your way down trying to find which ones you can cut, simplify or downscale. Chances are that you’ll find expenditure bloat somewhere.
5) Find the most painful internal processes
Why it works:
Non-technical teams will often get stuck in terrible processes because they lack the development support to fix the issue or because the company is stuck in an outdated mental model for a problem.
These processes can create significant wasted effort as well as affect morale. Worst of all, they can lead to the business incorrectly assuming it can’t scale because it assumes the operational model is unchangeable (without significant investment).
You can often find simple yet powerful solutions to these issues. These solutions often unlock significant growth potential for the business and free up teams to more effectively use their time.
How to look for it:
If possible start with a concrete measurement of the most time-sucking processes for internal teams. If these are not available, ask team leads and individuals about what they think these processes are and where they rank one against the other.
Ask yourself, “What’s a process that needs to get done but currently gets done very inefficiently?”, “Could that process be done with a different tool and as a result be made significantly more efficient?”, “What’s the 20% version of this process that would yield 80% of the result?” and “Could we scrap that process entirely, if not what would be the second best path?” to identify leads.
Dig into internal processes and look for the ones that would be easiest to solve. In these processes, you can often find many easy internal efficiency wins. For more information on how to tackle internal efficiency projects check out this article.
6) Find the leak
Why it works:
A bad enough data problem will consistently disrupt the user experience, your team’s focus, and introduce risk to your system.
In many cases addressing data inconsistency/utility issues can result in an efficiency boost to your product or can enable the team to drive a better experience down the line.
In most cases, teams already know where the bad data issues lie (if not where they start) making these kinds of problems some of the easiest to identify and understand.
How to look for it:
Is there a data set in your system that’s totally broken? For example, do you have data that should be standardized but is not, data that should be in one format but is in a less useful format, or data that is only captured half the time?
Ask yourself “Where is the bad data becoming bad?”, “What are we doing today to address it?”, “What is the impact of this bad data both in terms of issues but also missing upside?”, and “What is the ideal solution to this bad data creation problem?” to better understand the leak and the potential value of fixing it.
7) Find a way to connect the dots
Why it works:
It is often the case that two experiences should have been connected but your team never had the time to complete the connection.
Solving these cases can sometimes unlock a 1+1 = 3 scenario as the synergies between experiences will amplify the outcome for the user or supercharge the overall experience.
How to look for it:
There are a couple of good ways to find these kinds of opportunities:
Look to better leverage raw materials.
Think about your product’s raw material. What are the outputs that are being created by your systems? These can be things like videos, favorites, likes, comments, posts, documents, etc. Now think about how that raw material could be leveraged elsewhere in your product to achieve a positive effect.
Look to unite two separate experiences.
Think about two key actions/workflows/experiences your users are performing that have overlaps in the use case, data, or mindset. Then think about what the benefits would be from connecting those two experiences in a more seamless way.
8) Find the feature that needs retiring
Why it works:
Sunsetting features can create efficiency and morale boosts in ways that adding features cannot.
Features long past their usage will slow the system down, detract from the team’s core focus, and require deep knowledge that is often isolated to certain individuals.
As most organizations and teams have a hard time sunsetting past work, there is often a lot of opportunity to pursue this angle.
How to look for it:
Look for things in your system that create complexity and cost for your team but that have questionable or unknown value.
Ask yourself “What are our least used features?”, “What are the features we hear the least about?”, “What are the features that the team hates interacting with or supporting the most?”, “What do we keep getting bugs about that we hate working on?”, and “What happens if we do away with the feature altogether?” to find potential areas of your product that need to be cut out or simplified.