A Swiss army knife is a great example of remarkable design. It comes in different sizes and shapes, but always with a good set of tools that can help you in a variety of situations, from scissors and screwers to knives and tooth-sticks, everything presented in a compact package easy to carry with you everywhere. The Guinness World Record holder for this type of knives integrates 87 implements and 141 functions!

Wenger Giant Swiss Army Knife

The most common of these knives (and the one I owned) usually comes with around 15 tools, all of them very useful,… if you are a Boy Scout or Bear Grylls (and I am pretty sure he won’t need them either).

The average user like myself probably uses around 2 to 4 tools max from the whole package: The main knife, the scissors, the screwer and the cork screwer. That’s roughly 25% of all the tools that come with the knife. This means that 75% to 80% of what comes with the product gets wasted or in the best-case scenario, it is used on very rare occasions.

Now take a moment to think about this when reviewing the current state of your product, planning to intake new work or updating your release roadmap. Today we can see product teams and companies of all sizes following this ‘build something/move fast and break things’ approach.
This is true especially for startups, as their need to accelerate their growth increases over time and the pressure to please investors lead them to an urge to prove their value by taking a features focus philosophy. However, despite this being a valid approach when a company is starting and furiously competing in a complex market, it is simply not sustainable in the mid to long run if it doesn’t come with a more defined prioritisation framework and a more mature understanding of our customers.

How a Feature focus approach can harm your product

• Lose of Focus. When we end up focusing on building and releasing features because that’s where the value is, we are on the way to losing focus on other important tasks. First, it starts with maintaining time for those features already released, second, we can’t find the time to think about how to improve our core functionalities and the reason to be of our product, and third, we end up completely ignoring or avoiding to think outside of the box. What for? The more the better right?
• Less Time for Maintenance. Bugs and error happen all the time, user interfaces get outdated easily and the user experience can be broken for several reasons. Product and Engineering teams need to allocate time and resources to make sure proper maintenance of the product is in place.
  It is also important not to forget that with more features come more responsibilities and more demand for resources, time and effort to maintain what we offer.
• Legacy is Coming. Adding features on top of features consistently for a prolonged period of time will end up in a mountain of legacy code and design. This translates into the constant need for code refactoring and redesign work. This is time we are not dedicating to make our product better, but to make it work.

Adding features on top of features consistently for a prolonged period of time will end up in a mountain of legacy code and design.

It can impact your business

• Tactics replacing Strategy. Features are like Gremlins, cute and interesting at first but horrifying and problematic after a while. With more features to support, these will demand more resources, time and effort to maintain and enhance them. When the tactics of making features work start eating over 60% of your time, you can be in big trouble. That means the business has become reactive, rather than proactive and therefore, short-sighted and short-lived. Did I mention lose of Focus?
• Average in many things, good at nothing. Many features can make us forget the reason our business exists. Make sure the features the product team is planning to add to the pipeline are those that add real value to the core of the problem you are solving as a company, helping with the evolution of your business instead of diverting resources from it. On the dance floor of the market, always aim for your business to be the best dancer, not just the better dressed.

And it can cause damage to your team

• Burnout. This is the first word that comes into my mind when I see teams solely focusing on that new exciting feature coming up next sprint. If our values are not revisited, the product mission is not reviewed and communication fails, sooner or later, our teams will burn out, well-being will be affected and we will lose talent. The well-being of our teams is more important than the urge for proving value, there is no value nor product without a healthy team.
• Missing the ‘Why’. Burnout can happen fast, but it is also something that can be cooked very slowly. We, humans, need to add purpose to what we do in order to successfully collaborate. We need to be very intentional about what we do, and that includes every single feature we decide to add. If the process to decide what goes in and what goes out is too shallow, arbitrary or is missing steps, this will end up in meaningless tasks impacting the performance of the team and ultimately our product quality.
• Wasted Effort, Time and Talent. We can find great talent and potential in every team. When it comes to proper use of that talent, more than matching the right person with the right task, sometimes it comes down to matching the right person with the right opportunity. When the roadmap is dominated by the ‘Swiss Knife Complex’, our tasks, rather than different and unique become monotonous and repetitive. Opportunities get lost and talent and brainpower are wasted in doing one type of thing only: Adding that next new feature.

How to avoid falling into the ‘Swiss Knife Complex’

• Listen to your Customers. There is no better antidote against a feature focus complex than being an active listener, know your customer, their needs, their pain points when using your product or interacting with the competitors. A good understanding of who our customers are, allows us to keep an eye on where the real value is. The Customer support and Sales departments are unique sources of information and two of the main access points to our customers, make sure to maintain strong collaboration channels with these departments.
• Focus on the User Experience. Something to expect to hear coming from a designer, but honestly, don’t ignore the user experience. Adding features non-stop without thinking of the overall picture of how your users interact with your product will break your product, ending up in an unclear and confusing path for your users. Define well your user journeys and always review and validate the Personas. See the whole product strategy holistically rather than as a wish list.
• Define a good Effort vs Value prioritisation framework. This model allows us to identify which features can make the most positive impact on users and at what cost while reducing the risk of investing time, money, and effort into building features that can divert us from adding real value.
• Build and maintain a solid backlog to avoid missing anything that could end up adding real value. Consistent and stable progress is better than fast-track perfection.
• Stay humble means you remain realistic about the situation, the market, the competition, your product and the scope of your team. Being ambitious is a good thing, but being ambitious without being down to earth is a formula for disaster. Companies and product teams like individuals need a realistic approach to move forward.

Summing up

Some features can create real value for our users, becoming part of the natural evolution of our product. This article is not against adding valuable features to what we build, but a simple critique to adding them without questioning first if this is what our users need and without analysing the possible impact on the overall experience.

The Swiss Knife complex is not the root cause of the problems presented here but a symptom of possible imbalances in the team, product and business. Being aware of this, like many other common evils impacting product teams today is one of the first steps towards preventing them and staying on track of building good products while maintaining sustainable business growth.

Thank you for reading!

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