Slaying Feature Creep
“Wouldn’t it be cool if…” That’s how it usually starts.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if we had this? Oh, yeah, and that, we gotta have the latest in that other thing.”
Next thing you know, the charming idea of adding features has turned your product into a monstrosity. So here are some tools I find to help slay the feature creep before it eats your product alive.
Feature creep is probably one of the most fundamental challenges for product designers and product managers to contend with. It’s easy as you develop a product to get personally invested in what you believe is the right feature set for a product to successfully be released. Unless you’re part Vulcan, we can’t help but get emotionally attached to what we believe will make or break a feature or product introduction.
I believe there are a handful of tools at our disposal to help counter feature creep:
- Personas
- Agile development
- Usage metrics—both qualitative and quantitative
“A persona is like a stage actor who understands the motivations of their character and can then express them.”
Personas
Alan Cooper, the inventor of design personas, describes them as “A persona is like a stage actor who understands their character’s motivations and can then express them.” Making the most out of personas is a great first line of defense to keep the feature creep at bay. Understanding a user’s motivation when working with your product or feature will help guide you and the team on what needs to be included and what doesn’t.
Agile Development
Something teams I’ve worked with have invested in is really embracing the notion of agile development. While I realize it can be challenging to consider moving to agile development if you’re releasing at more extended periods, I can’t tell you how much developing and having weekly releases has changed our mindset on product development. While there’s an art of knowing what the minimal viable product (MVP) and minimal desirable product (MDP) is to go out with, I do think having a weekly sprint provides a comfort level to what these terms are. I can’t stress this enough, get the features out there in the hands of your users and measure and learn what is working for them and what isn’t. Feature creep to me is usually a select set of customers or your internal team speculating what is crucial for a product — not real-life users and customers giving you honest feedback.
Usage Metrics
users, you have to measure it to see where it’s hitting all the right notes and where it’s failing to meet expectations. Usage metrics are helpful to inform what features you set out to build out next. Qualitative metrics mean getting out of the building and meeting with your users. See what’s working for them and what’s not. You can then back this up with quantitative metrics. Quantitative means that you’ve added analytics into your feature set to see if the data aligns with what the users tell you. If you’re releasing weekly or in an agile manner, you can quickly bring back the insights from your users to the product team and make small but carefully measured iterations. What’s great about all this is the team is much more confident about the learnings and knows they’re building a product that users are actually using and finding value.
By using these processes and tools, you remove the emotional components and biases to shine a light on the essential features your users really can use. The guesswork and debates of whether a feature needs to get into the product right away slide by the wayside as actual data informs in making the best possible product prevail.
