I’ve had it, you’ve had it, we’ve all had it – Feature Creeper. You know, when that urge to layer on more and more features on top of your core product or service.
What started out to be a solid, concise, and simple idea, is now an overweight monster than is filled with bells, whistles, and unnecessary features – your project needs to go back on a diet – stop with all the feeding, will ya!
Feature creeper is one of those things that many entrepreneurs – myself included – fall into, typically during our first ventures. We feel the need to keep on adding and adding more features to a service in an attempt to make it “cooler” and “better.”
Oh boy, that type of thinking can be very, very dangerous for the budding entrepreneur. Throwing on features rarely – if ever – adds to the success of a particular service. What it usually does is draw attention away from your core offerings (you know, the features from your original idea before it went on a pizza and donuts binge).
It’s always best to rollout your service in stages, allowing your customers to define what features to add next. What’s the rush? Don’t feel the need to super-size your business on its debut – there’s time for that down the line. Overextending your business with an influx of features will likely result in your business model falling apart before it can gain any type of traction in the marketplace.
If you fall victim to the feature creeper monster during your first venture and as result your business falls apart, then consider yourself lucky. Huh, lucky? You betcha. It’s better to have done it in the beginning and learn your lesson before you got deeply involved in more projects only to fall even harder. Trust me, I’ve learned my lesson and I’m sure that many of my fellow entrepreneurs have as well.
You don’t need to be the first one to cross the finish line with your features. Pace yourself and let your company’s features rollout in a natural progression, not overnight. The ones who are running their fastest to beat out their competition are the ones who are likely to stop and take a few hits from their inhalers because – guess what – they’re out of breath.
Be smart and grow at a modest pace – do that, and you’ll always win the race in the long run, minus the inhaler.
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It’s similar to what people call “scope creep” — something starts small, reasonable and well-planned, only to grow and grow and grow like a bloated pig.
We need to get someone to draw a really scary picture of the Feature Creeper to really bang home this important message.
Hey Ben
Yea, feature creeper is very scary. Hehehe… I was looking for a great image of a monster to add to the header of this article. I want to scare all the scope/feature creeper out of entrepreneurs!
Dave,
Excellent post. I really like your point about starting out small, and then letting your core customers define where you go from there. It’s true – if you start out with 30 features and then realize that customers want 25 more and could do without 25 of them, then you have wasted time, money effort, and worst of all – a favorable first impression. Why not just start out with 5 dazzling features, and then add 25 more dazzling features based on your customers’ input? By rolling out features in this manner, potential customers are (1) able to better understand your product and (2) going to actually enjoy using it every step of the way.
Exactly, but yet I find that it is so, so hard for many young entrepreneurs to understand that fundamental concept; most are left to learn the hard way when their plan backfires on them. I’m sure that it’s possible to roll-out a million and one feature in a service and see some sort of success, but I don’t think that it’s likely. Hmmm… I wonder if myspace is a good example of that… In all honesty, I can probably pick out a TON of features on myspace that I find completely superfluous, but yet people love myspace regardless. I just signed up for an account and since then, I have been picking myspace apart in terms of features that just don’t make sense to me, but yet it’s has an insane following, go figure.