The Key To Delivering Value to Users: Mastering The Feature Success Ladder

The Feature Success Ladder or Use Case Success Ladder is a mental model for methodically planning how a feature needs to be experienced by users for high feature adoption. 

When is this used:

• Target Setting: define target user behaviors and KPIs to measure the ladder steps

• Design: ensure design maximizes chances of success by thoroughly addressing each ladder step

• Tracking/Analytics Definition: define tracking or analytics hooks to ensure all steps of the ladder are measured

• Analysis: analyze step by step to ensure conclusions can be drawn. For example: if the feature doesn't work, we can't conclude users don't want it. 

Keep in mind that a feature reaching the habit phase isn't necessarily achieving product goals. For example: if the goal is to increase revenue but high feature usage isn't a paid feature or one contributing to conversion rates. To ensure what we release indeed drives our product in the right direction we should establish our experimentation and measurement methodology.