How To Avoid Feature Bloat

When building a product, it is sometimes difficult to draw the line between what features to build and which ones to let go of. If that line is not drawn early and often, you end up with the most horrifying term any product will ever encounter: feature bloat.

Also known as feature creep, feature fatigue, or feature overload — having too many features is something all teams must watch out for. It can lead to customer churn, overly complex products, and unforeseen technical debt.

If you’re wondering how to avoid the build trap and build features with purpose, I’ve put together some tips for you below.

TL;DR

• Always ask ‘what’ and ‘why’ when looking to solve problems.
• Use a product problem template that can help your team identify opportunities.
• Avoid bias by focusing on feedback and not actioning requests.
• Prioritize your roadmap with objectives in mind.
• Prioritize usability above shiny objects.

The ‘what’ and ‘why’ of features

When considering what to focus on next, product managers should always ask two key questions:

• What problem are we trying to solve?
• Why are we trying to solve it?

This allows the team to focus on the product strategy, rather than the output and the solution. In other words, you are putting your focus on the purpose rather than the end result.

This then opens up the team to be able to run proper discovery, set a hypothesis, run experiments and understand whether or not it is actually worth it to move forward with the idea.

The product problem template

A good place to get started is to use a product problem template. This template can be used by anyone in your team when they’re proposing a new idea.

• What problem are you trying to solve?
• Hypothesis
• What value would this provide to the user?
• What value would it provide to our company?

Now let’s take a real-world example of an idea someone might send your way: