Welcome to Mike Kirkup

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I made the mistake of building additional features onto our existing product instead of stepping back to truly analyze the workflow of customers. But that initial mistake led to another critical error: getting trapped on the feature treadmill itself.

For those unfamiliar with the phrase “feature treadmill”, it refers to the endless cycle in which a development team continually adds new features to a product to satisfy customer demands. This pattern can trap teams in a situation where they are always chasing the next requested feature, rather than focusing on core value, product quality, or sustainable growth.

While starting with a solution before understanding the problem is a well-known mistake, we entrepreneurs still fall into this trap when it presents itself differently. Here's how I made this mistake at Arlo—and why it cost us months of development time and potential customers.

It has been a crazy three weeks since I announced that I was leaving Encircle. I have been truly blown away by the number of people who have reached out to catch up and share some of their ideas for my next adventure. I am excited to have found my new role.