Adding features does not mean adding value

Features and value are two different things and sadly, it can be slightly confusing.

Building a new feature doesn’t necessarily mean more value to the end-user and feature overload can even lead to users’ confusion, which we all want to avoid.

By not associating “features” with “value”, it’s easier to make decisions about what to and what not to build.

All in all, the challenge really is into figuring out what will add value as I think it’s really easy to fall into the “let’s build this cool feature (even though the users don’t really care about it)” trap and waste precious time.

Figuring out what will add value can be fairly complex and I’m not sure it’s something that can be guessed that easily. For this reason, one approach is often to release a lot of “beta” features and eventually kill the features that do not work. By doing this, you avoid supporting useless features and don’t spend months fine tuning features that’ll never be used.

This is only one method among many others and is out of scope anyway for this post. I really just wanted to make the point that adding features doesn’t necessarily mean adding value, figuring out what will add value and what features to build is another problem.

What do you think?