Mar 16, 2021

What if you didn't ship any new features for a year?

By Duncan Mackenzie • Issue #2 • View online

Features, as in new functionality. What if all you did was continue to refine and improve on your core functionality? As a user of a system, like Spotify or Netflix, what if they didn’t add any features, just focused on improving the speed and reliability of the existing functionality? There is an unhealthy obsession with shipping new features, instead of focusing on what is already in use and represents the core of your platform. In this issue, I’ll link to a few discussions related to this problem, but hopefully (if you work on, own, or even use a software product) you can also reflect on what your team focuses on, what they celebrate, and what is considered less important. Send some of these links or this whole newsletter around to provoke some discussion.

The inevitable result of focusing only on shipping features

Development teams often consider shipping new functionality to be ‘the job’, and everything else is overhead. I’d like to turn that idea around, so I wrote this up to discuss the importance of enhancing and maintaining the core of a platform instead of continually growing its feature set.

www.duncanmackenzie.net • Share

12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory

I recommend everyone read this post by John Cutler, as it is the best discussion of all the downstream impacts of focusing on features over actual outcomes. John writes about this topic, and related topics, often so be sure to click around and read his many posts.

cutle.fish • Share

Adam Kinney

@adkinn

This and the following comments. Stop starting new things, start finishing works in progress. https://t.co/yTpOeSyYjK

9:21 AM - 8 Mar 2021

Adam, a member of the Microsoft Docs team, posting about one impact of being focused on new work over shipping what we have already started, or enhancing what is already in production.

One-shot Project

There are so many of Vincent’s cartoons that fit this issue, it was hard to pick just one

vincentdnl.com • Share

Build Less (from Getting Real)

This book from the team behind Basecamp came out many years ago, but I find the ideas in it are evergreen. I’m linking to chapter 4 here, but the whole book focuses on lowering complexity and focusing on the core functionality of your project. I especially enjoy chapter 23, ‘Start with No’, in the context of adding features.

basecamp.com • Share

A Defensive Approach to Engineering Quality

One of the most important ways I can contribute to the quality of our sites is by saying no.

www.duncanmackenzie.net • Share

Confetti Moments from ZenHub

One of the indicators of a feature-focused team culture is visible in what we celebrate.

Do we acknowledge that, for most users, performance improvements and bug fixes are what really improves their daily experience with our product? Or do we only celebrate when we ship something brand new?

This post from ZenHub is a wonderful example of what we need to do more of, brag about a 30% increase in loading times and a 200kb reduction in our script bundle. I absolutely love to see it.

blog.zenhub.com • Share

Did you enjoy this issue?

By Duncan Mackenzie

In each newsletter, I'll share a set of links related to web development and software engineering. As the editor, my opinions are going to influence the topics and tone of this material, so expect to see lots of information on web performance and general topics around working in a software engineering team! Check it out and let me know what you think at https://twitter.com/duncanma

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