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 final hardening week so we might get through the week without another painful fix/test/fix/test cycle.

Becoming a feature factory with improved flow, predictability, transparency, and quality was serious progress. Feature factories have their place. They can be a milestone on the road to becoming a product-oriented organization.

It is much harder to organize teams empowered to deliver outcomes if teams still cannot deliver working increments. It is almost impossible to steer with evidence if teams do not continuously create working things that generate evidence and data.

The main issue is that organizations stay stuck there. They treat the feature factory as the goal, not a stopover. Agile and product theater make this worse by creating a reality distortion field where shipping more features looks like product success.

The value of the recent buzz around product operating models is that it helps product and technology leaders see through that distortion field. We should help them pursue product-oriented organizations that can seek customer outcomes. We should not disrespect the path that got them here.

Yes, you could argue that organizations should have moved from feature factory straight to product lab. But what about incremental change? Iterating? Inspecting and adapting? Most organizations needed the feature-factory stopover. Now we need to help them take the next step rather than fight the Agile vs. Product wars.