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<h1 id="avoiding-featurism">Avoiding Featurism</h1>

<p>2022-10-14</p>

<p>I rather enjoy the term &#8220;featurism&#8221;. I came across this term while reading the wonderful article <a href="https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/why-ancient-browsers.html">Why I don&#8217;t use Netscape</a>, which the author credits to Bernd Paysan. Although it sums up the current &#8220;digital product&#8221; industry quite well the more specific terminology, <em>creeping featurism</em>, works better:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><strong>creeping featurism</strong> (<em>noun</em>)</p>

<p>A condition in which one or more people, often in the form of a committee, progressively increase the scope and complexity of a project until the project is deemed infeasible and subsequently cancelled to the detriment of all involved.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Throughout my career of designing and developing software I have run into this exact issue far too often. The major issue with getting sucked into a black-hole of &#8220;featurism&#8221; is there is no single person to blame. It probably seems easy to place all the responsibility on PMs or team leaders, but even <em>if</em> they are the ones adding excessive complexity to a given project, it is the role of developers and designers to speak up. It requires a team effort. Therefore, the <em>whole team</em> needs to be on-guard to avoid it.</p>

<h3 id="simple-guidelines">Simple Guidelines</h3>

<p>These &#8220;tips&#8221; are not perfect, nor will they work for every work environment. Hopefully they can at least be used as basic guidelines and expanded upon from there.</p>

<ul>
<li>Explore the feature&#8217;s <em>benefit</em> to the product. You need to confirm that this addition will be a net-positive for both customers and your bottom-line.</li>
<li>All team members assigned to a feature need to scope it out. Far too often I see feature sets that require design input being estimated solely by developers and vice versa.</li>
<li>Radically limit the scope of each individual task[^1]. Each task should be clear-cut, bite-sized and look almost trivial.</li>
<li>Lock-in tickets. Once they are agreed upon they <strong>cannot</strong> be altered[^2]. Anything that absolutely <em>needs</em> to be added should become a future ticket itself.</li>
<li>Follow-up with feature reviews. When a sprint or milestone is reached, it is important to reflect on what worked and what didn&#8217;t. Call out any instances where the team steered away from the guidelines above.</li>
</ul>

<p>That&#8217;s it. Just a nice, simple baseline to branch off from to avoid &#8220;featurism&#8221;. Some items listed won&#8217;t make sense for certain teams and that&#8217;s okay. If you take the time to at least reflect on your feature workflow, I guarantee you&#8217;ll find areas to improve.</p>

<p>Creeping featurism can kill your product and the morale of your team. Avoid it like the plague!</p>

<h2 id="refs">Refs</h2>

<ol>
<li>This is easier said than done. Normally you will need to have developed some form of &#8220;point system&#8221; internally, so you know how to effectively divide features.</li>
<li><em>Taking away</em> complexity, making changes that do not impact workload or reducing the ticket is fine - within reason.</li>
</ol>
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