I’ve seen both sides of product building: chasing features that never launch, and focusing deeply on solving one painful problem. I share in this article both of these.
I loved the read! Thank you! I never knew you went through so many versions before now.
This got me thinking - I think feature factory and building features that customers want/need come from a different place psychologically. Feature factory almost feels like a collective imposter syndrome with the teams (or management) trying to prove that they are good enough by the amount of features they have. While what feature base is doing to me resembles more experimentation. Because you have to start from somewhere and the customer is the best place to start from trying to figure out what to build. It’s just about the “why” you end up building what you’re building - is it that you build because you have to (or you’re obviously not good enough) or you build because you have a hypothesis and you want to know if yoi were right.
My own personal goal is getting much better at curiosity and experimentation, but I do agree the feature factory trap is often closer than I care to admit.
Thank you for sharing, I think it's hard question to answer Are building what users want or what users need? So the possible answers lies in qualitative feedback + analytics so our hypothesis would have a better foundation.
That’s a very good question. I agree that the answer lies in experimenting and measuring, which leads to better progress toward the desired goal, in other words, maximizing value.
An example from trainings: users might like a course that’s easy to click through quickly and takes little time.
But we actually achieve the desired outcome better through training that creates a certain sense of discomfort, because this stimulates the brain to form new connections and thereby makes the learning process more effective.
yes, being lazy creatures, we try to avoid brain load as much as possible if there is no necessity.
Maybe the rewards of passing the course with great score, also can be incentive to be more engaged into learning thus build up a better understanding of cybersecurity best practices.
I loved the read! Thank you! I never knew you went through so many versions before now.
This got me thinking - I think feature factory and building features that customers want/need come from a different place psychologically. Feature factory almost feels like a collective imposter syndrome with the teams (or management) trying to prove that they are good enough by the amount of features they have. While what feature base is doing to me resembles more experimentation. Because you have to start from somewhere and the customer is the best place to start from trying to figure out what to build. It’s just about the “why” you end up building what you’re building - is it that you build because you have to (or you’re obviously not good enough) or you build because you have a hypothesis and you want to know if yoi were right.
My own personal goal is getting much better at curiosity and experimentation, but I do agree the feature factory trap is often closer than I care to admit.
Thank you for sharing, I think it's hard question to answer Are building what users want or what users need? So the possible answers lies in qualitative feedback + analytics so our hypothesis would have a better foundation.
That’s a very good question. I agree that the answer lies in experimenting and measuring, which leads to better progress toward the desired goal, in other words, maximizing value.
An example from trainings: users might like a course that’s easy to click through quickly and takes little time.
But we actually achieve the desired outcome better through training that creates a certain sense of discomfort, because this stimulates the brain to form new connections and thereby makes the learning process more effective.
yes, being lazy creatures, we try to avoid brain load as much as possible if there is no necessity.
Maybe the rewards of passing the course with great score, also can be incentive to be more engaged into learning thus build up a better understanding of cybersecurity best practices.