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

cutle.fish

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

#231

Post by [deleted] »

undefined1 wrote: post #145
johnkarahalis wrote: post #8

Feature addiction is real. This post points to perverse economic incentives as being one possible cause, but I have also seen this happen in open-source projects. It's a matter of listening to the wrong people, in my view. User feedback is incredibly valuable, but when user feedback comes in the form of GitHub issues rather than careful testing and conversation, the team will inevitably find themselves building more…

A useful metaphor we use in game dev: Players are the patient, you are the doctor. They're great at finding pain, but not at knowing how to heal it. It's on you to figure out what the underlying problem is and how to solve it. Also, some of my favorite quotes on this subject: You listen to all your fans and they always say "You should add this" or "You should add that." They never say "Take this out, take that out."…

[deleted]

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

#232

Post by kortilla »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #123
ehnto wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be important context to know if this is an agency or a product owner company. There is a whole spectrum of client-agency relationships, and some of them are more like a feature factory than others, and there's nothing wrong with that. Some companies want to hire a development team to work as if they were in house developers. Some clients just want to ask for Feature X and have Feature X delivered. They keep…

The general rule though is that the clients are asking for X, actually need Y, and get delivered Z - isn't it?

Depends. In many b2b custom software contexts, the client does really know exactly what they need (e.g. when you’re implementing integration between two products they are already experts of).

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

#233

Post by capex »

johnkarahalis wrote: post #8

Feature addiction is real. This post points to perverse economic incentives as being one possible cause, but I have also seen this happen in open-source projects. It's a matter of listening to the wrong people, in my view. User feedback is incredibly valuable, but when user feedback comes in the form of GitHub issues rather than careful testing and conversation, the team will inevitably find themselves building more…

Designing user research around watching people do something, and figuring out their needs is something I've covered in a recent post: https://adnankhan.space/user-research/2020/01/28/ask-users-f.... The idea is that your research objectives could be very different from what you're actually testing.

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

#234

Post by jyrkesh »

Alex3917 wrote: post #25
johnkarahalis wrote: post #8

Feature addiction is real. This post points to perverse economic incentives as being one possible cause, but I have also seen this happen in open-source projects. It's a matter of listening to the wrong people, in my view. User feedback is incredibly valuable, but when user feedback comes in the form of GitHub issues rather than careful testing and conversation, the team will inevitably find themselves building more…

Most times when users say they won't use a product because it's missing a feature: - Those specific users won't use it anyway even if you add it - The problem they identified is a legitimate problem that was preventing other people from using it - Whether your metrics actually go up depends on where that feature was in the critical path of your funnel. All else being equal, fixing legitimate problems with your produc…

Some of the best advice I've been given on this is to look at how the potential customer is already solving the problem today. If they're just ignoring the problem altogether, then they're not going to spend any money on you to solve it. If they're spending considerable time and/or money working around or manually solving the problem (maybe by working weekends, or buying a whole team of vendors, or outsourcing to Mechanical Turk type stuff), and you can solve the problem for them for less money and/or time, then it's a feature worth shipping.

It can give false negatives, especially with future looking and platform-type work, but it's a great heuristic for weeding out useless feature work

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

#235

Post by joshspankit »

nicksergeant wrote: post #157
joshspankit wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying this to argue against your points: I’m a fan of Tangerine bank and have been continually and loudly telling them to remove the balances on the account overview screen as it now triggers “burning a hole in my pocket” psychology. I only mean to say at least a few fans are actively asking for things to be removed, simplified, and (thoughtfully) refined.

You're asking a bank to remove visible account balances from a dashboard view?

Aha, I see why there’s been pushback.

To be more clear: I only want to see the balances from specific accounts. The two chequing accounts in this case.

I don’t want to see the savings account that has a slowly (and automatically) increasing balance because then I subconsciously count that as “too much” and think things like “I could spend a little and it wouldn’t make a big difference”.

To be fair, I’m also working hard at shifting my brain after a lifetime of ‘paycheque to paycheque’ patterns and it’s not enjoying the shift.

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

#236

Post by joshspankit »

jcheng wrote: post #196
joshspankit wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying this to argue against your points: I’m a fan of Tangerine bank and have been continually and loudly telling them to remove the balances on the account overview screen as it now triggers “burning a hole in my pocket” psychology. I only mean to say at least a few fans are actively asking for things to be removed, simplified, and (thoughtfully) refined.

If “burning a hole in my pocket” psychology is a struggle for you, a better banking overview screen will not set you free, but YNAB will: https://www.youneedabudget.com/ (Not affiliated, just a happy customer that finally broke decades of bad financial habits due to this app and its attendant personal finance philosophy.)

After skimming past recommendations for YNAB I looked it over just now, and because of Tangerine’s multiple accounts (max is about 15) as well as the money-transfer automation, I’ve actually been using the same principles just within my bank tools.

That’s why I was frustrated when they changed from a summary of chequing account balances to a full “dashboard” that showed all accounts.

Up until then I was doing awesome avoiding the “I’m flush with cash” triggers because I was only seeing my actual spending money and not the bills account, the rent account, and the various proactive savings accounts.

Essentially I had all the benefits of YNAB principles because of the tools Tangerine provided

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

#237

Post by joshspankit »

pjc50 wrote: post #174
joshspankit wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying this to argue against your points: I’m a fan of Tangerine bank and have been continually and loudly telling them to remove the balances on the account overview screen as it now triggers “burning a hole in my pocket” psychology. I only mean to say at least a few fans are actively asking for things to be removed, simplified, and (thoughtfully) refined.

Conversely, I'd consider an account overview without a balance to be useless. That's what an overview is for. shrug

Sorry, I realize I was not bringing in enough background to explain why it mattered.

You’re right for sure, and I do find benefit in the account overview, it’s just that I only want to see the “spending” accounts, and not the long-term savings accounts.

Much like it might change your financial choices if your bank overview also showed your available credit (instead of the balance owing) and a realtime update of home equity.

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

#238

Post by joshspankit »

roel_v wrote: post #165
joshspankit wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying this to argue against your points: I’m a fan of Tangerine bank and have been continually and loudly telling them to remove the balances on the account overview screen as it now triggers “burning a hole in my pocket” psychology. I only mean to say at least a few fans are actively asking for things to be removed, simplified, and (thoughtfully) refined.

Can't really tell if this is sarcasm or not...

Understandable. I am saying it genuinely.

The replies I made to other users will hopefully clear it up.

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

#239

Post by caseymarquis »

herval wrote: post #105
jugg1es wrote: post #65

I'm part of the technical leadership at a company who is transitioning from small to medium-sized company. This article is disparaging virtually all of the initiatives we're trying to actually implement. It's actually really hard to transition from anarchy into a more process-oriented where each person has a role to play so that Devs are no longer responsible for literally everything because everyone is used to Devs…

As someone working in my 2nd 1000+ developers “feature factory” company, this article describes exactly how things work here in general - and makes for a pretty disfuncional environment. At least in my experience, I think this article is pretty spot-on. If you see yourself just starting to drive to these sorts of initiatives - eg establishing “weekly cadence syncs” that require “wins”, or “virtual squads” as the main…

What sort of thing does one make with 1000+ developers?

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

#240

Post by emodendroket »

picubedplus1 wrote: post #229
hnuser123456 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, GTA V is successful and complex. But Untitled Goose Game didn't do too bad either.

There's upsides and downsides to complex and simple games. Fortnite may be simple in some aspects (basically a war game) but it's more complex than Temple Run. Both cater to different markets but achieve simplicity within their markets well.

I love lots of classic games like Contra which are at their heart very simple. But Yakuza 5 has everything from rhythm games to a little arena shooter built in and it's all optional content. A lot of it is kind of half-baked because it's so ambitious. That's kind of fun in its own way.
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