It’s absolutely true that you can have too much of a good thing.
Whether you’re talking about your favorite foods or your favorite apps, there always comes a point of diminishing returns.
In the context of digital products, this phenomenon is known as feature bloat.
Feature bloat can be frustrating for a user who just wants to get things done, especially when the product they’re using used to be simple.
If you’re a product manager or you operate as part of a development team, avoiding feature bloat can be key to boosting your MRR, reducing churn, and maximizing your bottom line.
Here’s how to do it.
What is feature bloat?
Feature bloat happens because companies always want their products to be better, to solve more problems, and encourage new users to try it. Over time, though, this can lead to a team drifting off target and delivering products that look very different from what was decided on during or following product discovery.
Why is feature bloat bad? Here are some examples of feature bloat so you can decide for yourself:
App feature bloat happens when developers try to solve for too many use cases — casting too wide a net can mean you do no one workflow excellently.
Software inefficiency occurs when a product is bloated to such an extent that the additional features compromise the functionality (speed, load times, etc.) of the product.
Overengineered products are simply more complex than they need to be. What was once a lightweight web browser might become a slow-to-load, feature-laden liability over time.
Avoiding bloat with feature-based planning
Now that you’re familiar with feature bloat and its many guises… how do we address it?
The first thing to note is that avoiding bloat is a conscious choice to be made by a development team. Whether it’s the product owner or the product managers themselves, everybody must commit to preventing bloat creeping in over time (hence the name ‘scope creep’).
One effective way to do this is with feature-based planning by understanding problems instead of focusing on "building new features”.
With this methodology, the team focuses on outcomes rather than output. It’s the digital equivalent of quality over quantity, and it’s a natural fit for combatting feature bloat.
When thinking of outcome-based planning product teams should begin by asking certain questions:
What is the problem we are trying to solve?
Why are we trying to solve this particular problem?
By asking these questions at the roadmap planning stage, product teams can essentially force themselves to confront the reality of whether solving a particular problem (be it an improvement, new feature, or a new product) is really needed — or whether it’d just be a fun or impressive addition.
These types of questions are sometimes known as a ‘product problem template’, and are very useful for keeping a development tightly focused on customer needs. The best thing about this approach is it enables product-thinking across the organization, and forces everyone to focus on the problem rather than the shiny object at the end of the road. This means more attention to detail, more attention to intention, and more attention to helping customers reach their desired outcomes.
The role of product vision in preventing feature bloat
With feature bloat posing many dangers, it’s essential to take a step back and remember why you’re building the product in the first place.
The product vision describes the big-picture goals for a product. These are aspirations relating to what a product can do for your business and your customers. Consulting the product vision at regular points during development will help you shift focus back to what’s important.
(Here is a product vision template for you).
Feature bloat is a common result of teams forgetting the product vision during planning and development. There’s a tendency to focus inward and only pay attention to how good a product can be on its own rather than what the impact of the product will be. This leads to ideation sessions filled with feature ideas that are nice to have but end up offering very little value overall.
It’s always good to look back on the product vision when the backlog starts to look a little full, and you struggle to prioritize. You can reassess the value of each item in the list to see how it fits in with the vision, how it will elevate the customer experience, and how it will benefit the business as a whole. Anything in the backlog that doesn’t directly contribute to the product vision can be taken out. This will help streamline development, ensure you’re only building for value, and cut down on budget and resource usage.
Lean product development principles
Adopting Lean principles in your development process is a foolproof way to eliminate feature bloat before it even happens. Lean product development allows businesses to save money and resources by creating an efficient, streamlined development process.
Here’s how each of the Lean principles helps you to avoid feature bloat:
Value for customers - Focusing on the needs and wants of customers can help reduce feature bloat dramatically. Sure, some features are required for basic functionality that don’t explicitly provide value, but putting users first will eliminate feature bloat.
Value stream - Optimizing your value stream will automatically eliminate feature bloat because you’ll end up cutting out anything that increases resource usage or workload.
Eliminating waste - One of the biggest benefits of working with Lean principles is that you’ll be focused on dramatically reducing waste. You’re aiming to build the best product possible in the most efficient way, so there’s no room for feature bloat.
Customer pull - Identifying customer and market needs will help you shape your product to address those needs, eliminating any features that don’t.
Perfection - The final Lean principle holds potential for feature creep. As you strive to create the best possible product you can, more feature ideas will pop up for consideration. It helps to remember your product vision, customer, and market needs at this point so that seeking perfection doesn’t turn into feature bloat. It’s also important to remember that perfection doesn’t mean stacking your product with every possible feature you can. It’s about choosing what works best for the product and your customer and what will elevate your business.
Usability: The antidote to bloat?
Prioritizing usability is one of the best ways to keep any product roadmap honest.
Why? Because the problems associated with feature bloat generally present themselves through usability issues. These might be:
Slow loading speeds
App crashes
Overly convoluted user journeys
Needlessly complex UI elements
By prioritizing usability, a product team can effectively build the product around what the users want (and use) within the product, rather than the other way around.
Consider the concept of the MVP, Minimum Viable Product. This design ethos suggests that, in order to take a product to market quickly, a development team need only add the absolute basic features needed to solve a customer’s problem. All killer, no filler.
The concept of the MVP doesn’t need to be abandoned once a product is off the ground. In fact, when it comes to combating feature bloat, it’s an idea which can help avoid this entirely. That’s because, when ideas and suggestions are tested against real-world scenarios — the asking ‘why?’ — if they don’t deliver immediate value and solve user problems, they shouldn’t be included.
Of course, one of the cornerstones of usability as a tool to avoid feature bloat is customer feedback. Keeping the lines of communication open via regular customer experience surveys and looking at your product analytics is an excellent way to ensure your team always knows what your customers want — and what they don’t.
Want to know more about avoiding feature bloat? Or how to keep your users delighted with the power of airfocus? Book a demo or start your free trial today.
The article was last updated in October 2024.
Andrea Saez
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