We had an NPS around 41. It was not awful but not great either. People kept saying the product was "powerful but a bit confusing," which is basically classic nice-person feedback that means "I don't really get what this does."
I thought we needed to add more stuff to compete. Better dashboards, more integrations, advanced analytics and settings. You know, the usual thing you do when metrics aren't where you want them.
Then we changed how we talked to customers. Instead of asking "what features do you want?" we started asking "what are you actually trying to get done when you open the product?" Sounds like a small difference, but the answers were completely different.
Turns out most people logged in to do one or two specific things. Everything else was just in the way. One customer told us, "I have to click past a bunch of stuff I don't need just to do the thing I came here for." That really hot stuck in my head.
We went through all our features and looked at the usage data. Anything less than 30% of customers touched in two months got flagged. We ended up removing almost about a third of the product. We simplified the navigation and made the main stuff way more obvious.
NPS went up from 41 to 58 in about three months. Our support tickets went down. Customers stopped calling it confusing and started saying it just works betternow.
Some people did complain about losing some features. But way fewer than I anticipated. And the customers who stayed were happier and churned less. I think we confuse "more" with "better" because shipping features feels like progress. Cutting them feels like giving up to us. But sometimes the best thing you can do is make less product.
Has anyone else had this happen? Did you get pushback when you killed features?