I’m not sure who originally wrote this, but I had it as a contribution to a private repo I was working on and saw value in making it public…
Features Mindset
We find that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce than designs that assemble long lists of features.
Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost. The more features there are, the more likely one will develop problems or will interact badly other features. We resist unnecessary features and focus on making the system just work.
Features that offer value to a minority of users impose a cost on all users. We want to avoid this cost and focus on core features because that is where we create the most value.
We see beauty in a simple, elegant feature that is easy to understand and use compared with a complex hard to understand feature that can do everything but nobody knows how unless they created it.
