The Feature Factory: A 10-Year Retrospective cutlefish.substack.com

A thoughtful and much more nuanced view on the feature factory idea, exactly what one would hope for with another 10 years of thought.

The projects → products thing caused a lot of companies to name everything/anything a “product,” over-hire product management, set design/UX back, “install” an “operating model” as if it was plug and play, and generally lose sight of first principles. During ZIRP, even “high performing” product orgs tried to go “multi product” and turned everything into products even when it made absolutely no sense to customers. It also had the effect of turning anything further down the stack (platforms, etc.) into a second-class citizen, or forcing it to adopt customer-facing product language to justify existence. Another thing: teams/companies forcing premature convergence, premature hiring, and premature branding around “new product teams,” when the context was completely off. A lot of layoffs were caused by this logic.