Subtraction for good

A design concept I came across recently while I was having a discussion with my friends (who are product freaks), about a new product idea. There were interesting ideas that came from each one of us, hitting that sweet spot of innovation, i.e. the intersection of desirability, viability & feasibility.

Four of us agreed to one best idea that was good enough to go ahead with the later part of building a minimum viable product. Keeping the user (or people or customer) under the hood of value, we started designing the business model canvas that would later help in designing the product. During the phase of listing out the key activities, we came up with a large set of activities. Few of us were proud of these discoveries but being a product design enthusiast I felt the list of key activities was quite huge & was spilling out of the designated area in the canvas; I went on to check if this can be reduced & I stumbled upon Feature Creep.

What is Feature Creep?

It’s a design principle that says — A continuous expansion or addition of new product features beyond the original scope.

I found we were trying to bring in all necessary activities/features our product was supposed to deliver. We were trying to make it as flexible as possible offering multiple solutions at the same time— Which would have later paralyzed the product completely. But this principle helped us to bring down the extras & keep only the relevant activities that were not beyond the scope.

Feature Creep usually occurs because:
1) Features are easy or convenient to add.
2) Features accumulate over multiple generations of a product.
3) Features are added to appease internal project stakeholders.

Feature creep is not always bad while designing the value proposition.

Best Case — Feature Creep changes the scope of a project, increasing time & cost with nominal impact on performance & the customer experience.

Worst Case — Feature Creep has unintended performance or usability consequences.

How to avoid feature creep:

-Be on the lookout for feature creep in design & development & educate your peers about the traps.

-Ensure features are linked to customer needs & are not added out of convenience or appeasement.

-When doing version up-gradation for a design, ask not just what can be added, but what can be subtracted.

-Create a project milestone to formally freeze the product specification (freeze means — no more changes).

Hence, more is never better.