If you founded a software company and there is one feature in your product that almost nobody uses, this one is for you. You know the feature. A customer asked for it, you built it, and the usage per account now says nobody touches it. Your CTO wants it deleted.
If you have never had to defend a feature against a usage chart, skip it. This isn't your post.
Low usage is two different problems wearing one number, and they need opposite fixes. Which of the two you have decides whether your CTO is right. I learned that on a feature I was ready to write off myself. The product wasn't B2B. It was a consumer site, and the number behaved exactly the way yours does.
The reading everyone in the room shares
For four years I have led product at Spotto, a Belgian real estate marketplace. Somewhere in it lived a search that worked differently from the rest. Instead of picking a postcode, you told it where you work and how you travel, and it showed you every home within thirty minutes by bike of that address. Or, if you're like me, you enter your favorite café and make sure it's at a bike-friendly distance.
The travel-time search sat in its own corner of the site, a room with its own door, and a very small percentage of our visitors ever found it.
The reading of a number like that is a straight line. Nobody uses it, so nobody wants it, so stop spending on it. Delete it in the next cleanup or, if someone feels generous, redesign it and hope.
I have cut a feature on that reading before. We once had a home dossier that showed you your home and all freely available information about it. I cut it on the usage number alone. I never asked how many people had reached it, and I still don't know which of the two problems it had.
What stopped me this time was a second number.
The number underneath
The travel-time search asked for real work. You typed in a place, chose how you travel, set a maximum travel time and picked a type of home. Four steps before you saw a single result.
Of the people who typed in a place between June and mid-September this year, 97 percent finished all four steps.
Most people who reached the first screen never typed in a place. But that screen was an introduction: a headline, a paragraph of explanation and a Start button, with nothing to type into. Closing it is putting down a brochure. Some people pressed Start and still left the address box empty, and I can't explain those away.
Typing in a place is the first step that costs you something. That is where I start counting, and from there almost nobody gave up, on a form that gave them every chance to.
Effort is the signal. When people push through four steps to get one specific answer, they are telling you they want that answer, and they are paying for it in patience.
That 97 percent is where low usage split in two for me. Low usage can mean people try the thing and leave. Then the thing is unwanted or broken, and you fix it or you cut it.
Or it can mean people never reach the thing, and the ones who start for real finish it. Then the thing is fine and the way in is the problem.
In your product the first kind is the accounts that open the feature once and never again. The second kind is the feature several clicks deep that the few accounts who know about it use every week.
On a usage chart those two look identical. They call for opposite decisions.
The tool worked. The door didn't.
The fixes we had already tried
Once you decide to keep a feature like this, the instinct is to polish it. Shorten the steps. Rewrite the copy. Run an A/B test on the button.
We had been polishing for years.
Six weeks after the site launched in 2023, our own review called the travel-time search not intuitive enough. We reworked it and released it again at the end of 2024. In 2025 it got its own homepage, a button on the property pages and a campaign on social media. This year it got its own ad on our results pages.
Most of the people who did reach the search were already on Spotto. We sent them to a separate screen, and most people who landed on it never got past its first page. So even the door people did find led away from what they were doing.
We had improved the tool and advertised its door. After both, the search still reached almost nobody.
You don't fix a form that almost nobody abandons once they have started it. A better room was never going to help, because the room was not where we lost people.
A better sign wasn't going to help either. The homepage, the button, the campaign and the ad all said some version of "search by travel time". That phrase asks a question nobody can answer yet. You can't want minutes on a listing until you have seen minutes on a listing.
What the people who found it were worth
A finish rate tells you whether to keep a feature. It doesn't tell you what the feature is worth. So I compared the people who had used the travel-time search with everyone else.
Among registered house-hunters who had saved a search, the ones who saved a travel-time search looked at two and a half times as many homes. They kept more favourites, stayed longer and came back more often, weeks and months later. The same pattern of engagement and retention showed up in three separate sets of records, on every measure I had.
Conversion was a different story. The people who saved a travel-time search did not contact real estate agents more often. They did so at about the same rate as everyone else. If you were hoping this is where the feature pays for itself in leads, it isn't.
There is an obvious objection to all of this, and it applies to the 97 percent as well. These were people who had gone looking for a hidden tool. Someone who does that is a planner with a commute to solve, and planners look at more homes anyway.
The tool found those people. It did not necessarily make them.
When I compared like with like the gap shrank, and in the strictest comparison I could build, the difference in who came back was no longer certain. You cannot tell finding from making while the tool is hidden. Everyone who finds a hidden tool is unusual.
So we built more of it
We didn't polish it and we didn't cut it. We removed the door.
Travel time no longer lives only in its own corner of Spotto. It is something you keep, inside the search everyone already uses.
You add your places, work, school, the sports club, and every listing on the site shows a line with how long it takes you to get there. If you haven't added a place yet, the listing shows the line anyway, with a question mark where the minutes should be. Tapping it is the way in.
The feature works without an account and stays on your device. The account is offered as the way to keep your places everywhere.
Why something you keep, and not just a better-placed search? Because of where the site leaks. Most people who sign up never come back after their first day, and the ones who save something come back more often. Retention was the problem worth a bet, and a place you have saved is a reason to return.
Retention is also the number I was least sure of. The gap in homes looked at survived every comparison I ran. The gap in who came back is the one that stopped being certain. We bet on it anyway, because it is the one the site needed.
The new version went live for everyone on 17 September. It took about a third of the development time we had left for the year, spent on a feature the usage chart said nobody used.
What will tell us we were wrong
What we would measure was written down the day before the feature went live, and the rule for reading it on the day itself. Both before any result. As more people add places, do house-hunters as a whole look at more homes and come back more often than they did before the release?
If they do, the feature creates that behaviour. If adoption grows and the site as a whole doesn't move, the old tool was only finding the keen ones, and we spent a third of our remaining year on people who would have come anyway.
The bet has limits. We released to everyone at the same time, so there is no control group. The verdict is a before-and-after, read through the autumn housing market.
It is also too early for a read. The new version has been live for a day, in a market that turns with the season. That says nothing yet about who comes back after a month.
I hand the feature over at the end of this month. If Spotto shares the numbers, I'll write the follow-up, whichever way it went.
What to do this week
Run the door test on the feature your CTO wants to delete. Before the meeting, ask for two numbers. How many accounts ever reach the feature? And of the people who take the first real step in it, the first one that costs them something, how many finish? Leave out the customer who asked for it when you count. They will always finish.
If the second number is low, your CTO is right about the feature. Fix it or cut it.
If the second number is high, the problem is the door, not the room. Don't redesign the room. And before you move the feature, write down what would prove you wrong.
If you have a feature like this and want to talk through what the two numbers say, I'm happy to spend 30 minutes on it. No pitch. Just an honest look at what you're dealing with. Book a call here.
I spent almost 10 years on the boundary between deciding what to build and actually shipping it, as a product and delivery lead. Now I run a consulting practice around that, and I write about the patterns every week.
The figures come from Spotto's own analytics between May and September 2026 and its platform records for the year before, rounded. The comparisons set people who found a hidden tool against everyone else. They say what those people did, not what the tool did to them. Visitor figures are undercounts because of cookie consent.