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12 signs you're working in a feature factory

44 points by sdomino 10y ago

65827 10y ago
I'm not sure what this means... what's the alternative? I guess I've never worked at a place where we had the time to refactor every feature or overengineer and measure the impact of everything, the reality of money is more important than feeling good. I'm not sure what's a good example of the opposite of this pattern, maybe a company like Google? Given how aggressively and rapidly they make their products worse for no reason and the contempt they seem to have for anyone who isn't a Google employee this makes me think maybe the factory is a better overall pattern. I mean maybe the engineers are a bit happier, but overall the Google model is a terrible strategy for products, masked by the 90% market share money making machine.
- lcw 10y ago
  I don't understand how you define success without a goal metric how do you know you are not wasting money or are actually making a ton of money off your feature... obviously you know... so you do have a metric... So the part that is missing from your work experience it sounds like is if you add a feature that doesn't meet these money metrics what do you do? Do you just say lets leave it there, and build another feature or do you question the hypothesis that lead you down that route? If you question your hypothesis then I think you are not a feature factory, because creating a new hypothesis might not be related at all to feature creation. However, if you decide to ignore your results and the hypothesis that got you there then most likely you move onto the next feature because that's really your only good option for revenue growth. The latter happens A LOT in large companies, and start-ups. It's more fun to build things then to think about why you are building them it seems.
edblarney 10y ago
Sounds like most startups. I can be a little chaotic.
iofiiiiiiiii 10y ago
I do not quite understand why the article calls it a "problem" at the end. I work in a feature factory. Business is good, employees love working at the company. What more could you ask for?
nikdaheratik 10y ago
I think whether this is a problem or not for your business depends on the size of the userbase and the distance from the people actually using it. Small software platforms pretty much have to be "feature factories" because they're meeting a niche need that none of the big players are willing to develop for. The product is whatever helps makes its users more productive or happier in this case. But if you have something with a huge impact, then throwing new features is not good if you don't know how helpful they may be to the end user. TL;DR, the article makes a good point, but I'd like to see more nuance, I guess.

44 points by sdomino 10y ago

65827 10y ago

I'm not sure what this means... what's the alternative? I guess I've never worked at a place where we had the time to refactor every feature or overengineer and measure the impact of everything, the reality of money is more important than feeling good. I'm not sure what's a good example of the opposite of this pattern, maybe a company like Google? Given how aggressively and rapidly they make their products worse for no reason and the contempt they seem to have for anyone who isn't a Google employee this makes me think maybe the factory is a better overall pattern. I mean maybe the engineers are a bit happier, but overall the Google model is a terrible strategy for products, masked by the 90% market share money making machine.

lcw 10y ago
I don't understand how you define success without a goal metric how do you know you are not wasting money or are actually making a ton of money off your feature... obviously you know... so you do have a metric... So the part that is missing from your work experience it sounds like is if you add a feature that doesn't meet these money metrics what do you do? Do you just say lets leave it there, and build another feature or do you question the hypothesis that lead you down that route? If you question your hypothesis then I think you are not a feature factory, because creating a new hypothesis might not be related at all to feature creation. However, if you decide to ignore your results and the hypothesis that got you there then most likely you move onto the next feature because that's really your only good option for revenue growth. The latter happens A LOT in large companies, and start-ups. It's more fun to build things then to think about why you are building them it seems.

edblarney 10y ago

Sounds like most startups. I can be a little chaotic.

iofiiiiiiiii 10y ago

I do not quite understand why the article calls it a "problem" at the end. I work in a feature factory. Business is good, employees love working at the company. What more could you ask for?

nikdaheratik 10y ago

I think whether this is a problem or not for your business depends on the size of the userbase and the distance from the people actually using it. Small software platforms pretty much have to be "feature factories" because they're meeting a niche need that none of the big players are willing to develop for. The product is whatever helps makes its users more productive or happier in this case. But if you have something with a huge impact, then throwing new features is not good if you don't know how helpful they may be to the end user. TL;DR, the article makes a good point, but I'd like to see more nuance, I guess.