Falling into a Feature Factory
The Causes of Reptilian Product Development
I’ve been mulling over recently how PMs end up working in a feature factory, a term coined by former colleague John Cutler. When PMs in my network ask me about my opinion on a role / company, whether it’s an environment where PMs can do interesting work with actual autonomy or whether it’s a “feature factory” tends to be part of the calculus. But no product team starts as a feature factory - most viable products start with a real customer problem and a differentiated insight that let’s them get traction in the market - so where along the way does the dysfunction emerge? What are the reasons PMs fall into a feature factory? And can you prevent your organization from heading in that direction?
My theory on how feature factories emerge is centered on the maker / manager split in most product development organizations; there are people who are focused on actually building products, and then others who are accountable for planning, orchestration, and ultimately impact. And when both groups are operating from their higher brain functions, delightful experiences can be created. But when one or both parties falls into a mode of just reacting from their “reptilian brain”, things start to go sideways.
Let’s look at the manager side of things first, because feature factories tend to be a reflection on the quality of leaders. In an ideal environment, the leaders of an organization not only have same level of customer empathy and understanding as the folks who are directly interacting with them (sales, support, research, engineering), but also are able to layer in their market understanding, pattern patching, scaling experience, etc in order to create a coherent strategy. But there are factors that can knock leaders off kilter and lead them down the path of a feature factory.
First, the time horizon on which you operate dictates what part of your brain you utilize. When you have ample time, yours plans and execution tend to be more thought through in terms of dependencies, risks, communication, etc. But when you’re operating in an emergency mode with a heightened sense of immediacy (i.e. from your reptilian brain), you start to make quick decisions with limited deliberation to just survive. And in many product development organizations, there is time pressure that leaders are constantly reacting to: executive reviews that need status updates, investor updates that need meaningful progress, press cycles that need major announcements, contract renewals that need upsell features, and many more rote rituals that shift the mindset to short-term thinking. When you live quarter to quarter and move from firedrill to firedrill, your lizard brain is indeed your best survival mechanism.
Beyond the operating timeline, the manner in which decisions get made is also a strong indicator of feature factory potential. When decision makers get to be too many and decision criteria get to be too fluid, the net effect on the day to do day makers in the product / design / engineering organization is every individual for themselves, horse trading between teams to get anything done, ultimatums from executives to compensate for demotivation, and finally attrition of critical talent that knows it can find a better environment for doing their best work. The diffusion of accountability on decisions, both in terms of getting made and having impact, leads to the best informed employees feeling the most sidelined; the reactionaries take over the organization and proactive planners have a hard time adjusting.
The last and most egregious dysfunction that leaders can introduce is a lack of rigor. When company executives are not crisp on what customer segments to focus on or which market dynamics to lean into, that trickles down to teams, which end up playing games with metrics and focusing on outputs over outcomes. When there’s no clarity on building something differentiated, you get a bunch of roadmap items that just mimic the competition. The focus shifts to getting things done by a date vs asking whether the thing is worth doing at all. All teams are treated as a unified resource pool instead of semi-autonomous units with their own unique sliver of understanding of the problem space and potential for outsized impact. And because there was no verification of demand to begin with, when random product ideas are brought to market and fail to get traction, the blame game begins across department horizontally, and up and down the org chart vertically.
Now, what about the makers? Are they just pawns while managers scheme? No, they are also legitimate actors, not just cogs in the feature factory machine. They too have the potential to utilize their entire mental faculties instead of over-relying on their reptilian brains. Just because the roadmap is snapshotted and communicated quarterly, doesn’t mean you can’t plan multi-quarter features (i.e. compound bets). Just because executives want the impact of product investments to be articulated as a function of revenue, doesn’t mean you have to make revenue your north star. Just because most rituals are about launches, doesn’t mean you can’t create new ones focused on landings. Just because the sales team is fixated on the launch of the new feature, doesn’t mean you can’t educate them on the value that already exists in the portfolio. Ultimately, for PMs to get the types of high-leverage, learning reps required to move into a leadership role, they have to get comfortable with saying no, slowing down, and thinking vs reacting. You have to control your lizard brain reactions to pressure from execs and move the discussion to a higher order part of your brain function.
I’ve tried to outline the most common reptilian reactions and side effects that precede a feature factory, along with some course corrections, in the table below:
As always, I’d love to hear from readers who are actively in or fear falling into a feature factory - please chime in via comments👇 or join the chat via the Substack app.
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further reading / references
if you enjoyed John Cutler’s feature factory post, read his current newsletter (The Beautiful Mess)
many feature factories also suffer from “strategy issues” - in Staying Synced on Strategy, I provide a framework for evaluating the coherence of a strategy
Metrics Malfunction is one of the warning signs of a feature factory
you can read more about “compound bets” in The Power of Layering Product Choices, which highlights one of the ways in which Amazon has stayed customer obsessed and avoided becoming a feature factory
Launches vs Landings is an audio post where I delve into output vs outcome focus
Buried Treasure is a reminder to focus on “what’s on the truck” vs “what’s coming on the next truck”
Sometimes product orgs see themselves falling into a feature factory mode but don’t have the flexibility to maneuver out of it due to product / tech debt - in Debt Relief for Product Teams I walk through formula for getting things under control
childish drawing / interpretation
