The Value Of The Feature Factory

Back in 2006, calling my product delivery organization a factory would have been a compliment.

We were struggling to deliver predictably. Quality was such a big issue that I joked about asking one of our QA engineers to take a vacation during our final hardening week so that we would have a chance to get through the week without additional, painful fix/test/fix/test cycles.

Becoming a Feature Factory with improved flow, predictability, transparency, and quality was serious progress.

Feature Factories have their place. They’re a milestone on the road to becoming a Product-oriented organization.

It’s much harder to organize teams empowered to deliver outcomes if your teams still deliver components.

It’s almost impossible to steer with evidence if your teams don’t continuously create working stuff that generates evidence/data.

The main issue I see with Feature Factories is that organizations stay stuck with them.

They see them as the goal, not a stopover.

Agile/Product Theater isn’t helping – it’s a reality distortion field.

The main benefit of the recent buzz around Product Operating Models is that they help product and technology leaders see through this reality distortion field.

We should help product and tech leaders pursue becoming a product-oriented organization that is empowered to seek towards customer outcomes.

What we shouldn’t do is disrespect the journey that got us here.

Yes, you could argue that we should have moved from the feature factory straight to a product lab.

But what about incremental change? Iterating? Inspecting and adapting?

Most organizations needed the Feature Factory stopover.

Now we need to get together and help them take the next step (rather than fight the Agile vs Product wars).

---