People want to be liked.  So naturally you want to say “yes” to people who asked.

As a product manager, having the confidence to say no to a feature is a necessity. Building a product is all about focus.  Focus on your target audience and strive for simplicity.

Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram, began with a complicated location-based iPhone app, named Burbn, that let users checkin and post pictures of meet-ups with friends. Kevin and his colleague Mike Krieger used analytics to determine how their customers were using Burbn and learned that people were using the photo-sharing, not the main check-in, features.  They decided to focus on their photo-sharing infrastructure and eliminated almost everything else.

This is a case of saying “no” after a product has been built.   Emotionally, it’s really hard to kill features.  But you have to consider all your investment as “sunk cost” once you learn that something is not working.