Here’s my favourite way to test the viability of a feature; pretend it’s already live.
If you’re planning on launching a new group, category, ideas area, event series, etc…pretend it’s already live.
Go through the motions of coming up with discussions for the group, write draft emails to people to respond to those discussions, write draft emails for prospective people you would interview, book time in your calendar for a 30 to 45 minute meeting to discuss the call, find someone who can edit the interview, write draft emails to product managers to respond to ideas, schedule fake times in your calendar to engage with each of them to get support.
Do everything you can do without directly engaging with people. You will soon find every new feature you plan to launch takes up far more time than you imagined. I’ll bet you begin putting these tasks off to focus on the urgent things happening right now.
Coincidentally, this is precisely why most new features fail. You launch new features without allocating more time and resources to ensure they succeed.
And if you succeed in this, you’ve got a huge amount of content and actions already lined up for when you do launch the feature.
