How To Tell If You Are Building A Feature Factory
A feature factory is a common build trap and organizational anti-pattern. The feature factory pattern occurs when the focus of a company shifts from improving a user’s experience or optimizing existing features to adding more and more new features.
How To Spot The Signs Of A Feature Factory
It can be very alluring to ideate on new features and innovation should always be the goal.
It becomes an anti-pattern, however, when the push for new features comes at the deficit of the existing product features.
A company begins to celebrate shipping new features as wins, while the value proposition of the product overall does not change.
Example
A Fintech platform might begin to measure success by the number and frequency of new features built for its end users as opposed to iterating and improving on core functionality. This can result in what is known as feature bloat (more on that in the future). It may seem like the right direction is to provide more tools and capabilities to users, unintentionally diluting the value across all features. In software, the whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts.
What To Do When You Recognize The Signs
The first step is to revisit and understand the problem you are trying to solve for your end users.
Before reaching for that shiny new feature and devoting resources in that direction, always ask if it will help improve the core experience of your company's product.
Shipping, followed by careful measuring through analytics tools and user feedback, creates a cycle that can reliably and incrementally improve products
Summary
Shipping new features and innovating are key to the longevity and success of an organization. Just be careful to not fall for the feature factory build trap which could dilute the value of your overall product by shipping for shipping’s sake