Product Pioneers: Unbarcamp with John Cutler

In his original posting back in 2015, John coined the term ‘Feature Factory’. After realising that more and more Development teams were often only focused on delivering requirements as rapidly as possible, he shared his thoughts on Feature Factories – not knowing what reactions this would trigger. People’s desire to understand the impact of their work unfortunately collides with the ‘factory’ work paradigm he outlined and in which many Development teams and Product Managers are stuck.

John himself admitted he had been a little naïve with his original posting, but had obviously struck a nerve. And he regretted he had only described the existing problem; since then he has been trying to provide possible solutions. From his point of view, there are three realities in this context that we need to be aware of.

1. Many companies adopt a Feature Factory approach and are very successful with it – one example is Microsoft (or parts of it). This is often related to the working domain and/or corporate culture.
2. Many Development teams are unsuccessful in trying to balance the pressure to deliver with the effort to make the actual impact of product development transparent. They often lack simple ways to generate insights into how their work benefits users, customers and stakeholders.
3. For every company without exception, it is a real challenge to escape from being a Feature Factory. Even with a solid database, the right mindset as well as the right processes and tools, it takes time to learn how to learn correctly.

John now differentiates his view of the Feature Factory by means of 12 dimensions, as he has rarely seen a pure black vs. white perspective. Based on these dimensions, the different nuances of a Feature Factory can be considered and possible ways out can be identified.

Importance of strategy

Without a strategy and a matching narrative, it’s very difficult to escape from being a Feature Factory. The strategy is the link between the product to be developed and its customers. If your strategy is ‘earn money’, your organisation will almost certainly be a Feature Factory. John pointed out that even the ‘panacea’ OKR does not create a sustainable solution without a strategy in which it is embedded.

Importance of framing model

In many organizations, the very reasonable question from management, "So what are we getting for our money?" can only be answered with concrete feature promises, because other tools and the necessary trust are missing. Where budget planning takes place at the features or roadmaps/milestones level, an organisation will tend towards being a Feature Factory – and because planning is time-consuming and entails a high need for security, this leads to the dreaded multi-year plans. On the other hand, planning budget for skills, products, value streams or Development teams helps to escape being a Feature Factory.

Influence of the organisational structure & alignment

Small decisions within the organisational structure can have a very large impact, as alignment between strategy and organisation is essential. John’s example was a central team of UX designers who form a bottleneck for all Product Development teams - instead of being directly integrated into cross-functional teams.

Investment of limited time