Feature Creep

What is Feature Creep? 

Feature creep – sometimes known as feature bloat – is where you continue to excessively add more and more features to a product beyond what was originally intended or what is desired by users. This leads to a product swelling in size, ballooning into a bigger beast than initially planned, to the detriment of its perceived value.

You may at first think that adding new features and updates to a product is a good thing. It’s always best to be able to offer more, right? Well not always. There’s a fine balance. See, when developing a product, you and your team would have done market and customer research to make sure you’ve found the right product features to drive success. Yes, you should always be learning, iterating and adapting your product, but if you lose sight of that original vision and start piling on features for features sake you could start to overwhelm your customers and cloud the fundamental value proposition

Piling up features into your product can actually start detracting from the value. It can make it harder for your customers to use, and start to push users away instead of enticing them in.

Let’s pretend you go to buy ice cream, plain old vanilla ice cream because you LOVE vanilla ice cream. At first, it’s served to you in a tub and you think, that’s great this is exactly what I want. 

But the next time you come in for vanilla ice cream, you find that it’s now served with sprinkles, chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and cherries in a cotton candy nest. Suddenly, this once awesome product is no longer what you wanted. It’s now a sickly, hard-to-eat mess, which was far better when it was just vanilla ice cream. 

This is what feature creep is like. 

Feature creep can cause a lot of issues for your product and business success. Adding feature upon feature can cause development complications, a bloated product, wasted resources, and a hell of a lot more. Feature creep is something that you’ll want to stop from, well, creeping up on you. 

Is Feature Creep the same as Scope Creep?

They sound similar right? But are they referring to the same thing? No. There are similarities, but there are also very key differences. 

Feature creep is all about adding more (and arguably unnecessary) bells and whistles to your overall product than originally planned. Scope creep, on the other hand, relates more to changes made on the fly, after a piece of development work has been specced. So while feature creep is about adding new features and diluting the original value proposition of a product, scope creep is what happens when significant changes of direction or increases in complexity happen during development. 

Scope creep happens at a more granular level than feature creep. Feature creep is a risk at the higher, strategic level with Product Managers making decisions about which product ideas to work on. Feature creep happens when poor product decisions are made and Product Teams are focused more on output than outcomes. 

Scope creep is a concern at the individual, feature or idea level. It happens AFTER something has been specced and work has begun. Scope creep happens once plans for a particular piece of work have been fully detailed and the development team have started work.      

Why is Feature Creep bad?

Feature creep is bad on two fronts. It makes your product development a lot harder, and it also negatively affects your customers. 

Adding more and more features adds complexity to your product, making it harder for customers to use, especially if they’re new to it. Having a product that can do a lot sounds good in theory, but it’s useless if your customers can’t work out how to use it. If your product is too complex, it can drive customers away. If they need to sink a lot of time to learn how to use your product, they can start to feel dissatisfied. By avoiding feature creep, your product remains intuitive and effective. 

By the way, if you’re looking for the best tools to help with product onboarding so that your customers are up to speed fast, we’ve got a list of the 9 best onboarding software tools. Check it out. 

Regarding Product Management, experiencing feature creep can make things a whole lot tougher. By adding more features, your resources are going to be stretched thin. You’ll have to spend more time and money building these features, putting your product at risk of going over budget and missing deadlines. Not a good look as a Product Manager. 

You also have to consider that the consistent ask of adding new features can make your work environment stressful. Focusing on outputs rather than delivering valuable outcomes can leave your development team feeling strained and maybe even overworked. This increases the risk of errors and setbacks, resulting in a far worse product. 

What causes Feature Creep?

It’s really easy for feature creep to spring up on you, and sometimes it can be tough to detect what’s causing it. Knowing the root causes gives you a better chance of preventing it. Here are some things to look out for that can cause feature creep. 

A lack of clear goals 

When developing a product, you need to know what it’s supposed to achieve. Your objectives and key results (OKRs) are your blueprint, your treasure map. Without these clear goals guiding your development from the off, it’s super easy to get sidetracked and sprinkle in a new feature here and there. 

If your overall scope of the product isn’t clearly defined at the start, unnecessary new features could begin to sprout, leading to a product that’s lost its way. 

If you find setting OKRs tough, we’ve got a resource you might find useful. A list of 25 ready-made Product OKR examples to help kick-start your thinking.. Why not give it a flick through?

Feedback overload 

We all want to make a product that each and every one of our customers likes, right? Listening to and actioning their feedback is a vital part of improving your product to make sure it does what it needs to do. That said, listening to and trying to action every bit of feedback you receive can lead to feature creep. 

You simply can’t accommodate each piece of feedback you get. If you try, you’ll end up building a complicated product that’s hard to use, trying to do too many things at once. When you get feedback from customers, it’s important to filter and prioritize based on the product’s goals and the needs of the majority. 

If you need more guidance on how to action feedback, check out our customer feedback strategy guide. 

Technology Enthusiasm 

Business leaders can sometimes be a bit like magpies: they want the shiny new object and often want it in the product you’re developing. Often a new technology will emerge and you could be forced to add features that utilize this technology just because they’re popular. 

“We’ve got to stay current and up-to-date, we can’t be left behind.”

This mindset is so common that there’s even a term for it: shiny object syndrome. Well, this mindset can be detrimental when it comes to feature creep. Just adopting the newest technology without a plan on how that’s going to benefit your customers isn’t going to enhance your product. A lot of the time adding new technology isn’t necessary and can detract from your original vision. 

If you’re looking at new, cool technology and are thinking, I need a bit of that, always assess if it meets the needs of your customers.

Competition 

It can be tempting to add a feature to your product just because your competitor hasn’t. You want to stand out from them and look like a viable option, so it’s natural to want to offer more. 

But, at the end of the day, adding more and more features isn’t what’s going to beat your competitors. What will beat competitors is sticking to your original scope and creating a product that solves the problems and meets the needs of your customers. 

Bad Product Management

If you’re not making hard calls or tough decisions, you’re not being the best Product Manager you can be. More often than not, you’re going to have to put your foot down and say no to new product ideas. This isn’t you being dictatorial, this is you making sure you do the right thing for your product. 

By not being a strong manager, there’s a risk that every new idea or suggestion from an internal stakeholder or team member will be green-lit, impacting the capacity you and the team have to do proper discovery work to uncover what problems your customers are actually facing and how you could help them.  

Who is responsible for feature creep?

You should never play the blame game – no one likes that guy. It would be all too easy to blame internal team members and stakeholders for suggesting ill-advised new feature ideas. 

You might also be tempted to blame your customers  for providing feedback and suggesting new features that don’t actually solve their problems. 

However, you’d be wrong to point the finger at these groups. Ultimately the main person responsible for feature creep is you. 

As a Product Manager, you have the final say on what gets added and what doesn’t, so if you’re allowing other people to add features off the cuff, then the buck stops with you. Accommodating the wishes of others without assessing if they’ll benefit the product makes feature creep your responsibility. 

As the person responsible, it’s also up to you to avoid feature creep and fix products that have been harmed by it. Good job we’ve got you covered on how to do just that.

How do you prevent Feature Creep? 

Define your goals and scope

One of the best ways to prevent feature creep is by creating a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your product. Knowing your goals, scope, and target audience helps you build a framework with which new features and ideas can be evaluated before you action them. This ensures that any addition you make lines up with the original vision.

Focus on the core features

When you develop a product, hone in on the parts of your product that provide the maximum value to your target audience. Think about the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) you can produce, as this will stop you from adding unneeded features and help you craft a product that attracts early adopters. With an MVP, you’ll be able to validate your product idea in front of a smaller audience before you add any extra features that customers might want. 

Set up a change control process

It’s not a bad thing to identify when your product needs a new feature. It’s just an issue when you make changes without following a process. Establish a detailed process to follow when evaluating and approving any new ideas or features. 

Backlog refinement or backlog grooming is a process to adopt. Here, your team can note down any ideas or potential features to your product backlog – or what we like to call an opportunity backlog – and then assess the viability of these ideas in a backlog refinement meeting. This ensures that you only action ideas that are worthwhile and that add value. 

Implement an impact vs. effort matrix

A good way to stop yourself from building expensive features that don’t help your customers is to use an impact vs. effort matrix. This is a way to map out how much effort and resources you need to put into an idea compared to how much value you get out of it. Here’s what an impact vs. effort matrix looks something like this: 

By visually seeing what proposed features are time sinks and what ideas look viable from an effort and outcome perspective, you’ll be able to make better decisions on what features you should add. 

ProdPad’s Idea Management tool comes with a super nifty Priority hart, which automatically plots your Ideas so you can easily pick out what is worth your time.

Champion good communication and collaboration

If your left-hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, that can cause feature creep. It’s important to foster good communication with your team to ensure that no one goes rogue and starts working on new features because they think it’ll benefit the product. 

Regularly review your progress to ensure everyone is on the same page and staying within the defined scope of the product. 

Say no

As a Product Manager, learning to say no can be one of the hardest things, but it’s also the most crucial. To avoid feature creep, you’ve got to be able to lay down the law and state when an idea isn’t worth pursuing. 

When saying no, make sure to give the reasons. This communication is vital in ensuring that you’re still working on building the best product for your customers. 

What to do if you already have feature creep

If you’ve been reading this glossary article thinking to yourself, ‘Oh crap, I have feature creep’, you may be stressing about what you can do to fix things. Don’t worry, all hope isn’t lost just yet. 

Follow these steps to help reprioritize your product and ensure that it offers the optimal amount of features for your customers.

1. Research what is and isn’t working: Look to get feedback from your customers to identify their core pain points and features they find confusing or unneeded. You could also look at your feature adoption rate to see which parts of your product are being used most and least.
2. Re-prioritize core features: Take another look at the original product scope and goals to identify the unnecessary features of your product. Look to see what’s really necessary to fulfill this purpose. You can use prioritization methods like the MoSCoW prioritization model to help you rank features based on importance. 
3. Start to simplify your product interface: Now that you know which features are just window-dressing, you can start to simplify your UI to make it cleaner and easier to use. One great way to do this is by hiding lesser-used features. You also want to make sure that common actions and tasks are straightforward and require minimal steps. 
4. Modularize features: If you’ve got extra features that still have a small audience, you could choose to make them optional extras or modular. This means that only the customers who really want the extra features get them, ensuring that everyone finds your product useful to their needs. 
5. Phase features out in increments: You don’t want to remove all unneeded features in one fell swoop. This can be really jarring for users and cause disruptions. Instead, you want to gradually phase out these features one by one. Make sure to communicate these changes to your customers and release a version for beta testing before fully rolling out the simplified update. 

Don’t creep your product out

Feature creep is a really common problem for Product Managers, and it’s likely that you’ve already experienced it. Sometimes, it can be hard to press pause and slow down your idea implementation.

By recognizing the causes and consequences of feature creep, you’re in a much better position to prevent it and keep your products to the original plan. By assessing the value of each new idea and potential feature, you’ll be able to build a product that best suits your target customer base.