Product Strategy: Escaping the Feature Factory
As head of the product team, I was facing endless feature requests, customer ideas, and conflicting internal pet projects. Having inherited no structure as it related to product management cycles, we were defenseless against projects we knew weren’t going to drive our business forward. As I observed the slow creep of technical debt, the cycles of doing and undoing work, and the struggle to deliver features based on whimsy, I knew we needed a change. I implemented a new framework, collaborated with my team and my peers to adapt the system to our needs, and upended our process for roadmap and feature requesting. Read on to learn how we stopped the conveyor belt of meaningless feature-building.