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Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

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Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#51

Post by PragmaticPulp »

whatshisface wrote: post #46
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #39

I suggest re-reading this article in the negative: Assume that your team implemented every single one of these bullet points perfectly, for every feature in every sprint. Now imagine that each of those bullet points is a recurring meeting invite on your calendar. Now imagine how happy you'd be spending all of that time in meetings or reading process-related e-mails so your company could satisfy the criteria of not be…

Most of the points in this article are relative, for instance what does it really mean to have no care for technical debt drawdown? How much care is not enough? However, one thing that it's specific about is the lack of measurement. There are some companies out there that have zero focus on customer feedback, and since there's only one zero, that indictment is not relative to people's expectations.

> There are some companies out there that have zero focus on customer feedback, and since there's only one zero, that indictment is not relative to people's expectations.

No company has zero focus on customer feedback, but the company may not be taking the feedback through channels that are most visible to you.

One of my most eye-opening experiences as a product manager was realizing that the most important customer feedback was not from the vocal customers complaining loudly on social media. The most important customer feedback was number of new customers signing up and their retention rate. To my naive surprise, chasing the feedback of the loudest complainers and detractors rarely turned them into proponents, and was even less likely to turn them into paying customers.

Someone, somewhere, is always making decisions according to customer feedback in some form.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#54

Post by dillonmckay »

lazyjones wrote: post #33
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that, if you're churning out features without thinking critically about why, your work might not even change the company. I've seen engineers, teams, even entire departments spend multiple quarters being a net drain on the company. But they never noticed, because they kept consistently defining release targets and hitting them.

> churning out features without thinking critically about why, your work might not even change the company Isn't this just speculation? Why would anyone build features without any thoughts about their benefit? In practice you never know how a feature is going to work out and benefit or harm the company, you just have to try it. Not trying is a sure way to lose to bolder competition.

I strongly disagree with this sentiment.

I’ve seen quite a few features added simply ‘because we can’, without any thought to ongoing maintenance, support, or additional infrastructure requirements/costs.

A little bit of common sense and forethought can go a long way in preventing unprofitable or revenue-decreasing features from being added to the product.

If you keep adding features, without increasing your conversion rate or user revenue, you are simply decreasing your profitability.

Death by a thousand cuts.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#55

Post by ipnon »

CameronNemo wrote: post #2

What do I do if upper management seems to be driving this process?

If your input regarding how the company is run is valued by upper management, then make a clear argument that they are running a feature factory and what they can do to change.

If no one cares what you think, then the best outcome for yourself and the your company is for you to find other employment. You labor is freed from the feature factory for more productive purposes and the probability of survival for your sub-optimal company is diminished, opening opportunities for more optimal companies in the same space.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#56

Post by gfody »

samyel wrote: post #52
antoineMoPa wrote: post #43

I'd rather work in a feature factory than a bugfix factory.

Eventually a feature factory will turn into a bugfix factory as more and more unmaintained and potentially competing layers are added.

..or some features are actually bugs, now your a bug farmer.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#57

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

gfodor wrote: post #41
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. "Spying" is just a deliberately loaded term to make it seem bad. What would you think of an office manager who set things up only according to requests, never trying to observe and anticipate employee needs?

What would you call it? Your analogy fails on several levels — is there a more direct counter argument you can make?

If you care about your user experience, you want as much data as you can get about what exactly your users are doing. This generalizes across all companies in all industries, and I would call it "data collection". Saying "we satisfied the requirements so it succeeded" is pretty universally recognized as a cop-out, which you resort to when you don't really care or have no other choice.

There exist strategies that step over the line to spying (you shouldn't, like, put tracking devices on your users), but the article doesn't suggest that you should do those.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#58

Post by dillonmckay »

richie5um wrote: post #28
davzie wrote: post #10

I don't actually understand what's bad about this, maybe someone who is in a company like this can explain why it's a negative? I am working with a company that is moving more towards this approach and I'm really enjoying it. Isn't this essentially what Basecamp's Shape Up method advocates for? Not everyone feels they need to be building something that changes the world I suppose. Each to their own.

I think the high-level summary of the article is ‘fire-and-forget development’ - ie producing features, but not measuring impact/benefit/usage. I’m not convinced ‘feature factory’ in itself is problematic (definition not provided). There is no problem (IMO) in optimising to ship features - as long as the overall approach is to measure impact/benefit/usage and then learn and iterate.

I beliece the issue the article is attempting to convey is that a preponderance of these ‘symptoms’ indicates a lack of optimization, and a failure or refusal to measure the impact.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#59

Post by BossingAround »

ryandrake wrote: post #38

I'm surprised by so many negative comments here (actually, I'm not). This great piece summed up a lot of awful aspects about commercial software development that I've also observed over the past 20 years, but have been unable to organize together and articulate as single problem. People are asking why this is bad. One way to think about why the Feature Factory is bad is that it's mostly open loop: You "launch" featur…

I think the reason why I was confused is that it seems there's a very fine line between a feature factory and Google/Twitter/Facebook/Amazon/...

At a lot of these high-functioning places, they seem to have "feature factory" moments with some tweaks (e.g. actually building metrics, refactoring, etc. so that the SW won't implode in 6 months down the line).

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#60

Post by dillonmckay »

lazyjones wrote: post #34
scribu wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're delivering something good for clients... That's the crux of it, isn't it? How do you know that what you're delivering is any good?

> How do you know that what you're delivering is any good? How do you know it isn't? You need to implement it and see whether it's good or not.

If you know it is going to be a nightmare to support, it will consume tons of resources (cpu/storage), and nobody wants to pay for it (or not pay enough to cover its costs), it is not good.

As has been mentioned many times on this site, it is very easy to sell $2 for $1 all day long.

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