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By PASCAL FINETTE

The Heretic is a free dispatch delivering insights into what it takes to lead into & in the unknown. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated.

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Oct 31st, 2014 Share: Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn

Feature Creep

It’s the classic mistake: Cramming more and more features into your product — and turning it into a bloated mess. The concept is easy to understand but hard to realize: Which feature of your product or service is truly important and which to cut from the spec?

It sometimes feels like the hardest question one can ask. And yet — it’s not that hard.

First ask yourself: What’s truly essential to your product? What are the features without which your product couldn’t work? Once you have those (and they should only be a handful) — start designing your product from a point of “not more but better”.

Before adding a single additional feature — take all the essential features and make them a delight to use. Make them the best they can be. And test, test, test them with actual users. You want them to love your product.

Only then you look at the next feature. And as you have spent hours upon hours with your users during testing already — it should be glaringly obvious what would make their lives better whilst using your gizmo.


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