Feature factories are everyone’s problem

There’s a familiar experience many of us share, one that transcends who we are and what we do: opening a digital product and feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of options, settings, and features that seem to be added without rhyme or reason. What once was simple and intuitive now feels like navigating a maze. We’ve all encountered it in project management tools, customer relationship platforms, or even in personal apps that we rely on daily. There’s a creeping sense that these tools, which are meant to streamline and support, over time become increasingly cluttered, more complex, and harder to use.

This isn’t an accident. It’s the byproduct of a certain mindset in product development that sees continual expansion as a measure of success. The underlying belief is that more options must mean more value, that staying competitive requires the relentless release of new functionality to meet every possible use case. But when you begin to examine the actual impact, a different picture emerges: it often leads to frustration, inefficiency, and diminished satisfaction for casual users, the most dedicated customers, and the very people working on the product at all levels.

Many of these digital products weren’t always so convoluted. They likely started with a core mission, solving a specific problem exceptionally well—which led them to your phone or laptop in the first place. Over time, however, pressure to compete or appease internal stakeholders often leads to an endless cycle of new releases. New teams are hired, tasked with building the next “game-changing” addition, and slowly, the product becomes a patchwork of half-baked ideas. The original simplicity erodes, replaced by layers of complexity that often serve no real need.

Enterprise software, consumer apps, tools in industries as varied as healthcare or finance fall victim to the same impulse. The result, is always the same: a fragmented experience for the end user who has to navigate through options they neither asked for nor want.

This is what makes the job of Product Managers and leaders challenging—and potentially rewarding. Growth targets and customer acquisition metrics push many of us to deliver more and more, but in doing so, we risk alienating our most valuable asset—the users who fell in love with the product in its original form. More isn’t always better. In fact, for many products, it’s actively worse. The illusion that more features equate to progress can obscure the damage being done at a fundamental level: increased training costs, rising user frustration, and a drift away from the original value proposition that made the product successful in the first place.

The repercussions extend far beyond those who build these tools and those who use them. When a piece of software becomes overcomplicated, it impacts everyone that touches it—internally and externally. Customer success teams are bombarded with questions they shouldn’t have to answer, Sales teams struggle to explain an increasingly muddled value proposition, and executives begin to wonder why adoption rates and satisfaction scores are slipping. This is a collective problem—one that requires an improvements in how corporations define and measure success in digital products.

Nobody wants a future in which software architecture and user interfaces are dictated not by what customers need, but by what looks good on a roadmap or an investors pitch deck. There is a significant difference between listening to customers and overreacting to every niche demand. Truly great products don’t cater to every possibility—they solve a specific set of problems better than anything else. The challenge for Product people is to recognise what to focus on, when to refocus, and when to have the courage to say, “No, this is does not belong to our platform.”

This is not designed to be an easy process. It requires alignment from all parts of an organisation—from the C-suite to engineering teams. It also demands that Product leaders have a deep understanding of what truly matters to their users, and the conviction to push back against the forces that push for more, more, more. To serve our customers better, we need to be focused on what progress looks like, and ask ourselves a simple question: are we making our products more useful, or just more complicated? The answer should guide everything we build next.