The cure for the Feature Factory Blues

In the world of software development, being trapped in a feature factory is a frustrating reality for many teams. A feature factory focuses on output—churning out features—rather than outcome—creating value. This way of working often feels like running on a treadmill: lots of motion, but little progress toward meaningful goals. Recognizing the symptoms of a feature factory and charting a path out of it is crucial for teams striving to deliver real impact.

What Is a Feature Factory?

A feature factory is an organization or team that prioritizes building and shipping features above understanding their effectiveness or value. In a feature factory:

• Success is measured by the number of features released, not their impact.
• There is little to no follow-up on whether the work delivered achieves its intended purpose.
• Customer feedback is limited, ignored, or arrives too late to influence decisions.
• Teams are rewarded for shipping fast rather than solving the right problems.

The result? Teams are stuck in an endless loop of delivering features that might not even address the needs of the business or its users.

Signs and Solutions for Escaping the Feature Factory

If you’re unsure whether your team is caught in this cycle, look out for these warning signs and consider these tactics to address them:

1. Success Metrics Are Output-Based

The Sign: KPIs are focused on things like the number of stories completed, features launched, or deadlines met. There’s little emphasis on whether these efforts achieve meaningful outcomes, such as increased user engagement or revenue growth.

The Fix: Redefine success metrics to focus on outcomes rather than outputs. If you’re measuring story points or a list of unqualified project features you’re doing it wrong.

• Customer satisfaction (e.g., Net Promoter Score or Customer Effort Score)
• Engagement metrics (e.g., active users, session duration)
• Business impact (e.g., conversion rates, revenue growth)

2. Lack of Customer Validation

The Sign: Features are planned and built with minimal input from users. Teams rely on assumptions or internal stakeholders rather than validating needs directly with the target audience.

The Fix: Make customer feedback an integral part of your process. Conduct regular user interviews, leverage surveys, and analyze behavioral data to validate problems before building solutions. Ideally, your core metrics are customer metrics. Take, for example, an onboarding flow: customer drop off at each stage should be measured and your organizational structure should encourage local ownership of each step.

3. No Iteration Post-Launch

The Sign: Once a feature ships, it’s considered “done.” There’s no effort to analyze usage, gather feedback, or iterate on improvements. It’s on to the next feature.

The Fix: Build mechanisms to track how users interact with features post-launch. Use analytics, heatmaps, and user testing to gather insights. Iterate based on these findings rather than moving on prematurely. I’ll repeat this over and over again: product and engineering teams need to be held accountable to metrics that directly translate to business impact.

4. Priorities Are Dictated, Not Discussed

The Sign: Teams work on a backlog handed down from leadership without a clear understanding of the rationale behind priorities. There’s no room for teams to question, experiment, or suggest alternative approaches.

The Fix: Encourage teams to ask “why” and challenge assumptions. Shared ownership of problems, rather than task execution, fosters creativity and accountability. Facilitate discussions to ensure alignment on goals. In order to do this effectively though, you will have to consider the culture and incentive model of your organization. If psychological safety is high, members of the prod-eng team will feel comfortable not only owning the outcomes of the team but also pushing back against people with inflated titles opining on the backlog.

5. Focus on Quantity Over Quality

The Sign: The team’s velocity—the number of story points completed in a sprint—is seen as the ultimate measure of productivity. This often leads to cutting corners or building superficial features that check a box but don’t solve real problems.

The Fix: Limit work in progress to focus on fewer, higher-impact initiatives. Quality should always trump quantity and, if you’ve set up the right measures the highest impact work should be obvious most of the time. As with most things, data should trump opinions.

6. Minimal Collaboration Across Functions

The Sign: Product, engineering, design, and data teams work in silos. There’s little cross-functional alignment on what success looks like or how to achieve it.

The Fix: Align product, design, engineering, and data teams around shared goals. Facilitate joint planning sessions and retrospectives to ensure everyone is working toward the same outcomes. Foster a culture of collaboration and mutual respect across functions.

The Payoff

Escaping the feature factory mindset takes time and effort, but the results are worth it. Teams that focus on outcomes over outputs deliver more meaningful impact, build stronger customer relationships, and create a more engaging and fulfilling work environment. To achieve this, it’s crucial to rethink how success is defined and measured.

Teams are, by nature, leaky abstractions—dependencies, overlapping goals, and competing priorities often blur the lines between functional boundaries. To address this, KPIs and OKRs should serve as the primary interface between teams, ensuring clarity and alignment while allowing for local ownership of outcomes. Each team’s metrics should directly tie to broader organizational goals, creating a cohesive structure that empowers teams to act autonomously while contributing to shared success.

If your team is feeling stuck in the grind of feature churn, take a step back and evaluate. Shifting your approach might just unlock your team’s full potential.