The life cycle of a community product feature:

  • someone comes up with an idea
  • person suggest an idea to the product owner of community site
  • product owner says thats a good idea but some of our community will not like it
  • idea stays on shelf

Common Product owner statements are -

  • "no, that feature is too complex for our user base"
  • "no, that integration will change the quality of our user base"
  • "no, that feature will place too much load on servers"

Solution = White labeling

Its not that hard to run different domain names and "different look and feel" sites targeted at different users bases (demographics). Naturally, one must also able to control what content is visible across the different site instances.

Combining white labeling with bucket testing makes it possible to perform Darwinian feature experiments - where the best survive and different user bases are fee to exist on the site they prefer.