<story><title>Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)</title><url>https://cutle.fish/blog/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-factory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johnkarahalis</author><text>Feature addiction is real.&lt;p&gt;This post points to perverse economic incentives as being one possible cause, but I have also seen this happen in open-source projects. It&amp;#x27;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 and more and more for no real benefit.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve quoted this before, but what Don Norman says in The Invisible Computer still applies:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don’t ask people what they want. Watch them and figure out their needs. If you ask, people usually focus on what they have and ask for it to be better: cheaper, faster, smaller. A good observer might discover that the task is unnecessary, that it is possible to restructure things or provide a new technology that eliminates the painstaking parts of their procedures. If you just follow what people ask for, you could end up making their lives even more complicated.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>undefined1</author><text>A useful metaphor we use in game dev: Players are the patient, you are the doctor. They&amp;#x27;re great at finding pain, but not at knowing how to heal it. It&amp;#x27;s on you to figure out what the underlying problem is and how to solve it.&lt;p&gt;Also, some of my favorite quotes on this subject:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;You listen to all your fans and they always say &amp;quot;You should add this&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;You should add that.&amp;quot; They never say &amp;quot;Take this out, take that out.&amp;quot; They say &amp;quot;add more, add more!&amp;quot; There&amp;#x27;s an old saying that I love about design, it&amp;#x27;s about Japanese gardening actually, that &amp;quot;Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else that you can remove.&amp;quot; I think a lot of designers think the opposite way - &amp;quot;What else can we add to the game to make it better?&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt; -Will Wright&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”&lt;/i&gt; -Steve Jobs&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die.&lt;p&gt;It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;  -Alan Moore</text></comment>
<story><title>Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)</title><url>https://cutle.fish/blog/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-factory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johnkarahalis</author><text>Feature addiction is real.&lt;p&gt;This post points to perverse economic incentives as being one possible cause, but I have also seen this happen in open-source projects. It&amp;#x27;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 and more and more for no real benefit.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve quoted this before, but what Don Norman says in The Invisible Computer still applies:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don’t ask people what they want. Watch them and figure out their needs. If you ask, people usually focus on what they have and ask for it to be better: cheaper, faster, smaller. A good observer might discover that the task is unnecessary, that it is possible to restructure things or provide a new technology that eliminates the painstaking parts of their procedures. If you just follow what people ask for, you could end up making their lives even more complicated.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Alex3917</author><text>Most times when users say they won&amp;#x27;t use a product because it&amp;#x27;s missing a feature:&lt;p&gt;- Those specific users won&amp;#x27;t use it anyway even if you add it&lt;p&gt;- The problem they identified is a legitimate problem that was preventing other people from using it&lt;p&gt;- 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 product is unlikely to move your metrics much, because most (randomly distributed) problems aren&amp;#x27;t at the frontier of the critical path.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a mistake to think that adding features that customers ask for will immediately improve your core metrics, but it&amp;#x27;s also a mistake to think that features that don&amp;#x27;t visibly improve your core metrics were a mistake to add.</text></comment>