More Features, More Problems

If You Don’t Know What Is Unnecessary, You Don’t Know What Is Necessary

A feature doesn't create value. What a feature makes possible is what creates value.

Read that again and let it sink in.

It may seem like a silly distinction to make, but this is the frame of mind you must be in to have a fighting chance of creating value for your users and customers.

All features are innocent of delivering value until proven guilty. Easy to say, extremely hard to do.

That’s because many of your stakeholders usually believe the following:

If this is the game you’re playing, all they will ask is: When will it be done? Can you tell me how it will work exactly? Can you tell me why the delivery of the feature is delayed?

The messy reality of delivering value is more like this:

Delivering a feature is necessary, but not nearly enough.

Instead of worrying about delivering that feature on time or how it works exactly, ask yourself different questions:

How will this feature grant progress to our users?

What will the feature enable them to do they weren't able to do before? How do we know that?

How can we tell or measure that we succeeded at improving their situation?

More features mean more problems. The more features you have, the slower you will deliver new features, the more obstacles and the steeper the learning curve of your product.

More features don’t necessarily mean you solved more problems. It may mean you’ve simply have created more problems for yourself. You're now the proud owner of a larger codebase you have to keep up and running. You often have bugs to fix and new code to refactor, that are not creating value, which slows down the time-to-market of future features even more.

Also, something to keep in mind: removing features can result in more value for the user. And if you can’t tell when a feature doesn’t deliver value, how can you tell if a feature is delivering value?

When you’re incapable of figuring out what you have to remove from your product, how can you figure out what has to stay?

If you’re not removing features, then you probably don’t know which features are pulling their weight.

We like adding. We suck at subtracting because it is scary. You lose something and that means taking on risk. It’s much easier to move on and keep on adding.

"Eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." - Hans Hoffman

Do you want more features that solve problems or more features that simply create more problems for your company, users and customers.

If you don’t know what is unnecessary, you don’t know what is necessary.

Delivering a feature is necessary to deliver value, but that doesn’t mean the feature is necessary.