What is a feature factory?
Feature Factory is a derogatory term in product management referring to a corporation that generates many features without putting quality first.
Feature factory refers to firms that constantly produce new features for their software or product. The term is often used negatively to characterize businesses that place a higher emphasis on quantity than quality. It results in a product that is unfocused and bloated. Features are only added to products to keep them up to date and generate publicity, not add value.
The term “feature factory” was coined by John Cutler, a well-known product management expert. He came up with the word after listening to a developer friend express dissatisfaction with how they ran his software firm. The friend described the impression that he was working on an assembly line at a factory rather than at a software firm and that he agreed.
Cutler coined this phrase to call attention to the lack of thinking about the functionality many software companies choose to include. Rather than concentrating on developing the product and meeting customers’ needs, feature factories focus on distributing updates.
The demoralization of software developers is compounded by the fact that it is a lousy development strategy. Adding better, more robust features is an easy way for competing enterprises to outperform a feature factory, as these are the features that truly assist users in achieving their goals.
The Risks of a Feature Factory
It’s risky for a company to fall into the feature-factory trap. Some features will not resonate with people, wasting development time and money. Consider the following scenario:
Competitors gain headway on the company. A company that acts like a feature factory wastes time and resources producing features without first determining whether or not they bring value to the product.
There are several semi-obvious surface-level issues that industries have to deal with regularly. Poorly implemented features, unstable software upgrades, uninspired additions to a product, and a lack of grasp of the target audience are all examples of what we mean by this. These issues, on their own, can spell disaster for a software company’s operations.
However, these are the only issues that feature factories are confronted with. These software organizations tend to switch up development teams regularly, making it challenging to establish routines and connections within the organization.
Since many feature factories attempt to implement numerous features simultaneously, there is frequently insufficient oversight over the management of these features. Retrospectives are also infrequent, which hinders communication, leads to the repetition of problems, and diminishes the level of passion among your development team.
It is also important to note that feature factories ignore their measurements. Because of this, there is a rift between the corporation and its customers. Instead of listening to the wants and needs of its customers, the business is chasing an unknowable and unmeetable production quota.
Finally, feature factories are readily outperformed by rival organizations that employ a design-thinking approach to their operations. Create a meaningful, practical, and balanced offering rather than a bloated product with no apparent specializations, and you will attract more customers than your competitors will ever be able to.
How To Escape The Feature Factory Cycle
● Measure and analyze the outcomes.
● Retrospectives should be done regularly by product managers.
● You should avoid team shuffles at all costs.
● Measure the results first, then construct a success theater out of the outputs.
● To improve product quality, take an iterative strategy. In the product development process, use an agile framework.
● Replace and delete features that are too complicated to satisfy users.
