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.

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.