What is a Feature Factory?
In product management lingo, feature factory is typically a derogatory term. It describes a business focused on building features rather than solving problems for customers. Here are a few characteristics of a feature factory:
- The product team measures its success by how much and often it ships.
- The company believes that adding a new feature always adds value to the product.
- The organization fails to test feature ideas before building them and fails to assess its success with users after the features ship.
What’s the Origin of the Term?
Product management expert John Cutler came up with the term feature factory. He saw some companies become more interested in completing story points than learning what types of functionality users actually wanted. It led Cutler to the factory metaphor. He viewed these organizations as factory workers assembling features without thinking about what they contributed to the product.
Cutler then published a popular feature-factory article in Hackernoon: 12 signs you’re working in a feature factory.
(Fun fact: John Cutler is a contributing author at ProductPlan.)
Hear John Cutler talk about this morning in the webinar, The Feature-Less Roadmap: Using Themes and North Stars to Ground Your Product Roadmap, below.
