The real cost of adding a new feature

Do you really understand all the costs of building a new feature and how it impacts your business?

Caio Flores
Product Coalition
Published in
9 min readAug 15, 2020

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I was reading an awesome article from Reforge on Product Strategy where they mention different strategies for different moments of a product.

One thing that called my attention was what they call the “Feature work” problem.

Feature work, in this context, means that you’ll try to increment your product to capture more value from your customers by offering a new feature to them.because I see many startups following this strategy as the only possible one which normally ends up with a feature creep product

I see many startups following this strategy as the only possible one which normally ends up with a feature creep product. If you work on a startup that is still struggling to find Product-market fit you probably heard things like:

We’re not selling enough because we need to build feature X and Y. After that, we’ll start growing a lot!

We lost this customer because we don’t have feature X, I told you!

Customers are not closing the deals because we don’t have feature X and our competitor has.

I’ve been there… I know how it feels.

It’s easy to think that the lack of features is causing your startup to not grow enough, but remember that you have an infinite number of variables that could be causing that like wrong value proposal, the wrong market, wrong people, wrong timing, wrong selling speech, etc. So don’t fall in the trap of only considering that features are the problem.

Complementary to that, you have to understand no feature comes for free. When you have just a few customers already start reporting bugs, you start solving them but more and more emerge. You start to realize that one awesome feature that you built is being used by just a few customers, and that’s the one that has more bugs and needs more attention. It means that each new feature that you add to your products has a cost…

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I'm a Product Manager now working with Crypto. I write about Product, Crypto, Startups, Technology and other stuff