What is a feature factory?
Feature factory is a derogatory term to describe organisations focused on churning out features rather than solving problems for customers.
Such organisations are characterised by a failure to test ideas before building them, this leads to shipped features which may deliver little or no value to the user and does not adequately assess its user value.
The pitfalls of operating a feature factory are:
- wasting development time and budget.
- losing ground to competitors.
- additional functionality which makes the product complicated and difficult to use.
Generally speaking, teams working in a feature factory can be said to not spend enough time in the Discovery step of the product management process 🔍. A good method to use for avoiding becoming a feature factory is the Opportunity Solution Tree.
John Cutler coined the term and describes the 12 signs that you are working in one.
