I’d be lying if I said that the term Feature Factory is something that I came up with by myself or that the term was particularly new. I learned the term from a blog post from John Cutlefish. Nevertheless, after working in an array of teams as a developer and trying to foster a data-driven culture from an analyst perspective, I’m yet to meet a team that would not suffer from this condition, on some level at least. In the end, we are just human.
Being productive instead of creating value
Feature Factory is a condition a software team or project has where new features are considered to be the greatest value the team can produce. To extend the definition a bit outside the field of software, we can generalize that Feature Factories prioritize Output over Outcomes. With this description, the opposite of a Feature Factory would be a team where it doesn’t matter at all what they have created, but the only value lies in the positive impact they have had on the organization's bottom line.
Simultaneously, one of the key drivers and indicators of a Feature Factory is the following statement: “...but at least we got the feature done”. The underlying meaning of this statement is that the team is happy to produce visible change and new shiny features, even if their impact on the significant measures the organization has is minimal or unknown. According to my observations, this is a built-in paradigm many people and organizations have: putting in the effort and building something big is valuable in and of itself.
What makes this issue interesting is the fact that from a motivational perspective, it might even be useful to acknowledge one’s efforts since it can teach the Growth Mindset. However, we should disregard what we have built and done instead and concentrate on the bottom line value. Just sitting on top of your hands for a week is entirely acceptable if the outcome is the same as working hard the whole time.
Opinions over data, assignments over goals
Feature Factories don’t often build themselves, but are born in the right environment. You can recognize the fertile breeding ground for a Feature Factory from a phenomenon sometimes titled HIPPO: Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. This is a decision-making pattern where opinions, feelings, and intuitions (and corporate rank) matter more than objective measures and data. The critical issue is that the team building the features is only offered specs and orders to build stuff and never targets and measurable goals.
In this kind of environment, you don’t have any other option but just build the thing and hope that your boss is happy. One way to observe this structure is to answer the question: is it more important for teams and individuals to create a positive impact or to produce the features they’re told to? For me, the response has often been extremely enlightening: finally, I understand all the counterproductive actions the team has taken.
Discussing together or waiting for specs to implement
While usually an organizational issue, Feature Factory can also stem from the behavior of individuals. All production facilities are built out of machines, and so is the Feature Factory: Ticket Machines, namely. Being a Ticket Machine is the property of an individual team member who prefer sitting at their desk and waiting for the next ticket to arrive. They are concerned more about the parts they are responsible for and less about the whole they are contributing to.
On a team level, this can be quite easily observed from the fact that there’s little planning together (or the planning is only related to implementation of individual tasks or organization of work). It’s important to state that Ticket Machines can also be created. The best method is to offer little perspective for the team members about the big picture. Similarly to the team level conditions: don’t give goals or tell about the high-level targets and expect fast delivery on fixed tasks and, before you can notice, you have a reliable Ticket Machine.
As with many organizational issues, there’s a way to alleviate the problem of Feature Factories. The cure is called Objective Targets. That is, however, a bigger topic on its own. More of this on my next blog – stay tuned for that.
