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“Every new feature you build, on average, increases the value of your product linearly.” Why do you believe this? It doesn’t match my experience and I don’t th

by jshen 4y ago

“Every new feature you build, on average, increases the value of your product linearly.” Why do you believe this? It doesn’t match my experience and I don’t think it’s a good way to think about it.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago
Can you provide an explanation as to why it doesn't match your experience? There might very occasionally be a "killer feature", but that seems far more uncommon than features incrementally increasing the value of the product.
- jshen 4y ago
  For starters, a lot of features add negative value. For most things, people don’t want everything and the kitchen sync thrown it. It confuses them and makes the product hard to use. If your model were true, any dummy off the street could achieve linear growth in a product by just continually adding more features. That’s not how it is. Second is what you hit on. Some features add exponential or greater value. This means that the value of new features does not fit a bell curve and reasoning about it with averages is a mistake.
someweirdperson 4y ago
Where there are dependencies between features, effort increases more than linearly (even more than polynomial). If usefulness increases only linearly, that puts an upper bound on the meaningful size of an implementation.
- jshen 4y ago
  I don’t believe the usefulness increases linearly. I think many features have a negative or zero value which makes it even worse!
  - iopq 4y ago
    negative can still be linear
    - jshen 4y ago
      You completely missed the point.
llamaLord 4y ago
IMO if an existing product is swinging between failed features and wild successes, chances are that it's being done based on luck (either good or bad), not any particularly great PM practise. Sure, startups and new products will either go gang busters or broke. But any decently mature product is almost always going for steady incremental improvement based on feedback and market shift. Now, I'm not saying they're achieving that... but that's what a decent PM should be aiming for.
Nomentatus 4y ago
You're right, value tends to multiply product value by a percentage, at a minimum. And can lead to a breakthrough in applications and sales. Which shouldn't be underestimated. Worth pointing out. But complexity (particularly if you can't squash dependencies) tends to go up by orders of power as sloppy code grows. I think that's their point.

by jshen 4y ago

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

Can you provide an explanation as to why it doesn't match your experience? There might very occasionally be a "killer feature", but that seems far more uncommon than features incrementally increasing the value of the product.

jshen 4y ago
For starters, a lot of features add negative value. For most things, people don’t want everything and the kitchen sync thrown it. It confuses them and makes the product hard to use. If your model were true, any dummy off the street could achieve linear growth in a product by just continually adding more features. That’s not how it is. Second is what you hit on. Some features add exponential or greater value. This means that the value of new features does not fit a bell curve and reasoning about it with averages is a mistake.

someweirdperson 4y ago

Where there are dependencies between features, effort increases more than linearly (even more than polynomial). If usefulness increases only linearly, that puts an upper bound on the meaningful size of an implementation.

jshen 4y ago
I don’t believe the usefulness increases linearly. I think many features have a negative or zero value which makes it even worse!
- iopq 4y ago
  negative can still be linear
  - jshen 4y ago
    You completely missed the point.

llamaLord 4y ago

IMO if an existing product is swinging between failed features and wild successes, chances are that it's being done based on luck (either good or bad), not any particularly great PM practise. Sure, startups and new products will either go gang busters or broke. But any decently mature product is almost always going for steady incremental improvement based on feedback and market shift. Now, I'm not saying they're achieving that... but that's what a decent PM should be aiming for.

Nomentatus 4y ago

You're right, value tends to multiply product value by a percentage, at a minimum. And can lead to a breakthrough in applications and sales. Which shouldn't be underestimated. Worth pointing out. But complexity (particularly if you can't squash dependencies) tends to go up by orders of power as sloppy code grows. I think that's their point.