Feature Factory
A feature factory describes a product development approach focused solely on delivering a high volume of features, often at the expense of user needs and overall product quality.
You're running a feature factory when your teams celebrate shipping another feature while customers cancel their subscriptions. It's product management by checkbox – an idea sausage maker where any notion gets packed into deployment code and shipped out the door.
I once advised a B2B SaaS company that bragged about shipping 47 features last quarter. Their customer churn? 15%. Their core user flow? Still broken. That's a feature factory: where output beats outcome every time.
Most teams think more features equal more value. Wrong. I've seen products with hundreds of features that solve zero actual problems. The real damage happens when teams start measuring velocity instead of value. Story points become the goal. Sprint burndown charts become the prize. Meanwhile, customers keep hitting the same roadblocks they've complained about for months. Feature factories don't just miss the mark – they actively build the wrong target.
Product managers in feature factories become order-takers, not problem-solvers. They spend their days writing requirements documents and attending grooming sessions. They track feature completion rates like factory supervisors. But here's the hard pill to swallow: your job isn't to feed the development machine. Your job is to make customers successful. The moment you start optimizing for feature output instead of customer outcomes, you've stopped doing product management.
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