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Avoid Being a Feature Factory
Product / Advice
Don't measure your team by the features it ships.
The Symptom
Feature factories crank out features and call it progress. Roadmaps grow, backlogs swell, users adapt to the churn. Nobody asks whether anything moved a real metric.
Signs You're One
- Success is "shipped on time" — not "changed user behaviour."
- No one remembers to validate whether last quarter's features worked.
- Planning is which features to build, never whether to build any.
- Retention is flat but feature velocity is celebrated.
How to Escape
- Measure outcomes, not output. "Activation lifted 8%" beats "shipped 12 features."
- Require a hypothesis and a metric for every feature.
- Kill features that didn't work, visibly.
- Leave gaps in the roadmap for discovery and fixing.
Why It Matters
Feature factories confuse motion for progress. They burn teams out shipping work that doesn't matter.
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