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

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.