Product Feature Inflation
Gabriel Steinhardt
Founder, Author, Public Speaker. Developer of the Blackblot Product Manager's Toolkit? (PMTK) Methodology
The many causes of unused and unneeded product?features
Introduction
Multiple reasons may cause an excess of unused and unneeded product features (aka Product Feature Inflation).
This review enumerates the causes of Product Feature Inflation.
The Standish?Report
In 2002, during the Third International Conference on Extreme Programming, Jim Johnson, Chairman of Standish Group , an IT research and consulting firm, revealed a Standish research report that estimated the usage proportion of product features in a software application.
Standish estimated that in a typical software application, 64% of the features were never or rarely used, and 20% were always or often used.
Several similar reports by other research institutes emerged in the early 2,000s, each demonstrating relatively the same percentages and indicating the existence of the Pareto Rule in a product’s feature set.
The Pareto Rule or Pareto Principle, named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto , asserts that 80% of outcomes (outputs) result from 20% of causes (inputs).
For example, 80% of a company’s total revenue is generated from the sale of 20% of its products in its catalog.
Similarly, a software application’s optimized product feature set, which includes the top 20% of most used features, can address 80% of user needs.
The percentage of features used in Microsoft Word by the majority of users ranges between 5% to 12% depending on the source, the year the research was done, and the MS Word version measured.
This ratio means that consistently, about 90% of product features in MS Word are not being used.
Too Many Product?Features
The cost of producing product features that will never or rarely get used is immense, long-term, and far-reaching.
Every unneeded product feature has to be planned, designed, developed, tested, documented, launched, marketed, sold, supported, and terminated.
Producing unneeded product features requires excessive effort, time, and cost, and the sheer abundance of too many features could have technical implications for product development and later in debugging and user support.
Everyone agrees that unneeded product features and an unjustifiably bloated feature set are detrimental to the product and the business.
Therefore, why is it that some two decades after the Standish Report was published, many software products still deliver feature sets with an overwhelming number of unneeded and unused product features?
Main Causes of Product Feature Inflation
Product Strategy?—?According to the Blackblot PMTK Methodology? , Product Strategy is a coordinated set of long-term decisions that build and enhance products to fit market needs and outline how to build a product competitive advantage.
The lack of or an incorrect product strategy can lead to making the wrong product decisions or sub-optimal product feature prioritization, which could result in a product’s feature set containing unneeded features.
Technology-driven Companies—Unnecessary product features, overly complex product features, and even unnecessary products can occur at a technology-driven company that is dominated by engineers who attempt to manipulate the value formula and increase a product’s value by adding as many product features as they possibly can.
Still, although discouraged, a technology-driven product delivery strategy (aka Push Mode, Technology Push or Feature Factory) is a viable option for companies .
Sales-driven Companies?—?Also known as project-driven or custom-job-driven, sales-driven companies will alter their product’s feature set to accommodate a specific customer’s particular wishes.
When product features are consolidated from among the product variants, the eventual outcome is a universal feature set with many features that are unneeded by the overall market.
Feature Poker—Poker is an American card game often seen in Wild West movies.
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In order to stay in the game, a player must meet or exceed the opponent’s monetary bids.
Technology Companies are often drawn to an expensive and impractical game of Feature Poker.
In Feature Poker, the competitors reciprocally match and add features to their products.
Many technology vendors produce products by engaging in Feature Poker?—?a practice where the vendors are constantly matching and adding features relative to the competition.
Engaging in Feature Poker will result in bloated product feature sets because the competitors will always match feature for feature, which requires them to constantly add more new features to be ahead and different.
Feature Poker creates bloated products with unnecessary features.
Scope Creep?—?Scope Creep is an undesired situation where uncontrolled modifications, mostly additions, are made to the product’s feature set.
Scope creep (aka Feature Creep) occurs when the product’s feature set is not fully defined, not fully documented, or not properly controlled.
For example, little market knowledge and research is available on market needs, and product management relies on intuition, past experiences, or internal opinions to define the product’s feature set.
Scope creep can also occur when product developers independently add more product features while disregarding product management’s guidance and also allotting more time to develop those features.
Scope creep can occur when ownership and final decision-making are unclear, resulting in too many people or the wrong people making wrong product decisions.
Scope creep can occur when product development begins while incomplete, ambiguous, or missing market requirements exist.
Premature development forces further learning of the market and occasionally causes readjustments to the product’s feature set as more market knowledge is gained.
There is often great reluctance at this stage to terminate the already developed and potentially unneeded product features.
Miscellaneous Causes Product Feature Inflation
Market Dynamics?—?Due to a change in market conditions, previously viable product features could become unneeded. Some of these unneeded features may be terminated and removed, but due to a cumbersome termination process or legacy issues, some unneeded features could remain on the product’s feature set.
Tenders?—?Governments and large organizations issue tenders (formal requests for vendors to provide goods or work) for software applications, which may dictate a predefined feature set that the requestor finds necessary. Those predefined feature sets may not be optimized and may include unneeded features that the customer falsely projected they might need.
Regulation—Government regulation mandates adding product features or performance characteristics that are outdated or do not conform to market needs.
Haste?—?Product feature prioritization is influenced by launch dates and pressure to deliver in a timely manner. In these scenarios, prioritization decisions are often made by relying on intuition, which may result in adding unneeded, unvalidated product features.
Bad Data—Erroneous data and market research may lead to the addition of unneeded product features.
Legacy?—?Older and presently unnecessary features are maintained because new features are dependent from a functional or technological perspective on those old features.
Catch-all—This approach intentionally introduces a very broad feature set (BloatWare) to cater to diverse customers and market segments. Aside from potentially adding unnecessary features, this approach has implications for cost, complexity, development schedule, and maintenance.?
Summary
There are many primary and secondary causes of unnecessary, unused, and unneeded product features.?
By understanding the causes of Product Feature Inflation, it is possible to engage in mitigating activities.
This review enumerated the causes of Product Feature Inflation.
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