When “Nice-to-Haves” Are What Makes Your Product Stand Out
Rethinking what we call “nice-to-haves” and why they might be the real advantage.
How many times have you heard this:
“Let's leave out all the nice-to-haves and focus only on this.”
And it's understandable.
Time, budget, priorities, they’re all real.
How do you define what a nice-to-have is? Sometimes, the things that get labeled that way are exactly what make your product click with people.
I’m all for building fast, launching imperfect, and showing things to the world early.
But how do you ensure that the thing that you build fast fulfills its purpose?
The Illusion of Nice-to-Haves
The term “nice-to-have” sounds harmless, but most of the time, it’s a disguise for uncertainty. When teams don’t know what will make something meaningful, they default to what’s easy to track and cut details that don’t look essential on paper.
Guess what? Those are often the details that can make or break a product.
A product doesn’t just need to work. It needs to work in a way that feels right.
What Actually Matters
Approaching this depends a lot on where you are in your product journey, but let's imagine you're creating the first version of your product.
You’re standing in front of a whiteboard full of ideas, and everyone’s saying, “Let’s just get something out there.” You know you shouldn’t overthink it, but deep down, you feel uneasy. What if the thing you release says the wrong thing about what you’re building?
When you’re testing an idea, your job isn’t to build fast; it’s to learn fast.
And that means being intentional with every detail.
Now, with the speed and power of AI, we can create and launch faster than ever.
But when everyone can generate screens, flows, and features in seconds, sameness becomes the default.
That’s the paradox: the easier it gets to build, the harder it gets to stand out.
The difference isn’t in the feature list; it’s in what problem it solves, how the product feels, how it talks, and what it means to the people using it. That’s why the “nice-to-haves” are now the difference between being noticed and being noise.
🔍 A quick lens to find your true differentiators:
What will help us learn something important about our audience or the problem?
What emotional job are we really solving?
What will make someone feel this was made for them?
What’s the thing no one else could copy overnight?
What would we regret not doing if we launched tomorrow?
When Details Really Matter
❤️ Tone and Voice
Cutting all personality to “focus on the product” sounds efficient until people don’t trust it. The way your product speaks is what determines whether people keep listening. Even a few honest, clear lines can turn confusion into connection.
🧭 Onboarding or First-Use Guidance
Onboarding is often treated like a nice-to-have, something you add later, once the “real” product is done. But that’s the moment when people decide yes. In those first few seconds, they’re not just learning what your product does; they’re deciding if it’s worth their time.
💬 Conversational Design
If you’re testing a chatbot or anything that talks back, personality isn’t fluff; it's the test. People aren’t judging whether it replies; they’re judging whether it feels natural, respectful, and worth engaging with.
💫 The Relationship
In every AI product, you’re defining a relationship. Are you building a tool that listens, a system that decides, or a presence that adapts? For example, the difference between assistive and agentic isn’t just capability, it’s about how much trust, agency, and emotion you design into the interaction. That's not a "nice-to-have".
3 Exercises to Find What Really Matters
Quick, practical exercises to cut through the noise and find what truly matters:
⚡️ The Competitor Scare
Ask yourself: What’s one thing that, if my competitor launched it tomorrow, would make people switch instantly? Now build that part.
⚡️The Gut Test
Ask everyone on your team to finish this sentence:
“I’d feel uneasy launching without…”
The overlap between answers helps you point to what truly matters.
⚡️The Replacement Test
Ask: If someone built a clone of our product tomorrow, what would keep people from switching to it? That’s what keeps people from leaving when everything else feels replaceable.
The Real Question
So the next time you hear “let’s skip the nice-to-haves,” pause and ask:
What if what we’re calling a nice-to-have is actually our competitive edge?
In the race to launch, many products chase speed and lose soul.
Let’s not forget to build meaningful things.
Thanks for reading! 🫶
👀 More AI + UX Reads:
From My World
Last week I was back in my hometown, Timisoara, where I ran a workshop at UPT University: From Idea to Validation: The AI-Powered Playbook.
The hardest part? Doing it all in Romanian and translating my usual mix of AI and design slang on the fly. That was fun!
By the end of the session, the students had defined problems they wanted to solve, created concepts, built functional prototypes, and even planned how to test them.
We did live demos, and I was genuinely impressed by the all amazing ideas!
Would you join a session like this if I hosted one online?
Let me know in the comments 💬
Yes love this!!! So many of the features that I love about apps feel like they might have been nice to haves. But now they’re literally what keeps me using that app over something else.