Arlo Mistake #2 - Choosing features over product quality

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.

And when it happens to you, it is so incredibly seductive! I understand now why teams get stuck on this treadmill. It is the constant belief (hope!) that this next feature is going to be the one that will shift things. The market is providing consistent feedback that the product is good but not good enough. You're so close—surely this next feature will tip the scales. If you just add (insert the feature) it will make the difference. Every demo has its own nuggets of wishes for the product so it is easy to fall into this trap especially if you are both building the product and performing all of the demos.We had a deals page for lenders/brokers that would allow them to manage all of their active deals and a separate archive page. We had several customers ask for the ability to permanently delete deals with the caveat that they'd want to recover accidentally deleted deals. We spent  over a week of design time coming up with a solid solution before I ultimately scrapped it because there is no way this is blocking customers from adopting the product. Goodness!

Another implicit side effect of being on the feature treadmill is that product quality starts to suffer. When the product is changing so quickly (and constantly) so many little product quality issues show up. The design you originally conceived now needs to be re-thought with the inclusion of that new feature. The product team starts moving quickly through the testing process to get features out into the market. Even worse, it’s easy to let the core of the product rot as the QA process focuses on new features rather than the core workflows.

After the decision was made to put Arlo into maintenance mode, I spoke with one of the developers asking what he thought the biggest mistake was… we never stopped to chase down a critical race condition in the product that had been plaguing us for months. For those unfamiliar, a race condition refers to when different parts of the system are running at the same time and depending which finishes first it can cause a bug in the product. In the end, we wasted a lot of time investigating and dealing with the side effects of the race condition instead of confronting it head on. Another great symptom of being on the feature treadmill.

The feature treadmill doesn't just waste time and resources—it actively deteriorates what you've already built. While you're chasing the next shiny feature, your core product is quietly falling apart.