That Next Feature is not Free

Published in

Product Zero

3 min readJun 7, 2021

When I picked up coding, technical software tasks immediately became less daunting. The unfortunate side-effect was that I started developing the unhealthy mentality that features were “cheaper” than they were in the past.

Huge mistake.

Features (even small ones) are not free.

Why is that?

Overview of Cost

We are incredibly biased towards short-term thinking. We get so caught up in the short-term pain that we lose sight of the long-term side effects.

Perceived Cost

When we contemplate new features, we tend to consider only the following costs:
(1) Time required to scope the feature
(2) Time required to design the feature
(3) Time required to develop the feature
(4) Time required to ship feature into production

When we have a competing backlog (and we almost always do), we consider an additional cost:
(5) Opportunity cost of not working on something else

That’s about it.

Actual Cost

There are actually a few extra costs along the way.

Even in the short term, you should consider:
(6) Time required to train internal stakeholders about this new feature
(7) Time required to document new flows for internal stakeholders
(8) Time required to document new flows for customers
(9) Time required to market this new feature to new customers
(10) Time required to market this new feature to existing customers

If that list is hasn’t convinced you, here are the costs that accrue in the long term:
(11) A more complex workflow that your customers need to learn
(12) A more complex codebase for new engineers to learn
(13) A more complex codebase for engineers to maintain
(14) A more complex UX flow for new designers to learn
(15) A more complex UX flow for designers to maintain
(16) Slower future engineering due to more complex codebase
(17) Slower future design work due to more complex workflows
(18) It becomes harder for product marketing to describe what you do
(19) It becomes harder for support to support a more complex product
(20) and… coordination cost to support this

That new feature is not cheap

Why do we fall into this trap

In the best-case scenario, we scale our company whilst bearing all that long-term cost. The worst-case scenario is that we fall into the low-wage consulting trap.

If we recognize this, why does this still happen?

I don’t have a good answer.

My personal theory is that we don’t always have a clear “product vision”. BUT, I’ve seen companies that have a clear product vision, still fall into this trap.

If you can’t avoid it, manage it.

How do you “manage away” these feature requests?

The genesis behind these “new features” tend to be a certain workflow that hasn’t been previously supported and only 5–20% of your users really care about them.