The Useless Feature

Have you lately developed a useless feature?
Such that will hardly be used, or that no one really cares about?

This is how it starts:
You had a great idea, such that would really improve the product or the service. In most cases you also consulted with your managers and customers to get their inputs, and if you really had the time, you did some data analysis to reinforce your idea. All seemed to be great, so you prepared your sprint, planed, groomed and finally executed. You got a great feedback, and many Kudos from all upper management. It made you feel so great.

However, not long after, you discovered this feature you developed is hardly being used! This feature is actually Useless!

We explain this to ourselves in many ways. Either because the focus has shifted to a different project, management has changed, customer has changed, other dependent teams work was lacking or never done, technology has changed, reorganization just occur and shifted everything, and so on…

Shall we care?

Yes, no question about it, we’ve just wasted a lot of time and money, and in most cases we are now stuck with a technical debt and more complex system that we need to maintain. Either because removing the feature has its costs that no one will budget (it has no visible business value), or because the feature is being used by several customers that we don’t want to disappoint.

Do we really care?

Unfortunately not that much, at least not at the short term. Simply because we already got the acknowledgement for doing a great job, we are already focused on the next project, budget waste is the problem of finance and really high level management who are not in the details, and mainly because the impact of a useless feature is not visible on the short term, but on the long term when we need to tackle this technical debt.

What can we do?

The goal is obvious, reducing the amount of useless features as much as possible. However, doing it is probably the hardest work of all, and what really differentiate good managers from the rest.

My simple advice – Take smart decisions 🙂

How? Easy to say, hard to do.
Here are four tips:

1. Imagine what would happen if you do nothing. In most cases we think something is very important or get in love with our idea. We must stop and think about what happen if we won’t do the feature, also how would we use the free resources and if this trade-off is better. Don’t get me wrong, decision we must take, the question is how we reduce the wrong ones significantly. We know that many of our decisions are not really deliver any value, some wrong decisions we cannot avoid and have to try, but many can be better – in particular many of the small day to day decisions.
2. Consult Consult Consult with anyone who is willing to listen. This is the number one advice for anyone who build a startup but I find it useful in regular work. If we consult with smart people who are familiar with the material and cannot convince them, we better start questioning ourselves.
3. Clean useless features all time. Being a hoarder of features, data and inventory that has questionable value has always a negative impact on our business. It is subject to bugs and issues, need to be considered it in future developments, system performance may suffer, knowledge need be preserved and convincing to remove useless features is always difficult and comes in the worst timing. By taking constant small decisions on removing features, deleting data and giving up inventory is much easier and lead to better decisions on what’s really matters.
4. Hire curious people who can think wide. CV is not enough, and in many executive roles it isn’t that important. Best decisions are made by people who understand the impact of any decision on others (people, systems, services, tasks) which cannot be done without a deep cross-functional understanding that is unique to our organization. Only curios people that have the desire to learn constantly and such people who are interested in others work, will know to do the right balance and most difficult cost-effective decisions. Find people who have experience in different industries and roles, people with many hobbies and people who got promoted in the same company because of being successful. Get references only from people who worked with the candidate and interview them mainly on this aspect. Do that, such skills cannot be taught, the rest you will anyhow need to teach the new recruits about your unique organization. Unfortunately we recruit based on technical information like CV, years of experience and less on the such critical soft skills.

In conclusion

Sometimes it is just better not to touch!
We need to start caring about the negative impact of useless features!
Best decisions always consider the impact of not doing them at all and are taken by curious people who have deep cross-functional knowledge.
Useless features are being examined and cleaned constantly. By saying features, I refer to software features, data hoarding, hardware inventory and anything we create in our work.
My observation in this article is relevant to any organization, department and business. It can be implemented on software and hardware management work, operation, development and product management.
This what guides me in my daily work and what helps me take better decisions – I hope.

Ori Feldstein is a senior manager, experienced in eCommerce and in management of multi-million dollars programs in various industries – Big data, e-commerce and Defense. He is a co-founder of two family owned websites in the B2B eCommerce of chemicals (cheta.biz ; chemcenters.com). Follow him on Linkedin, @ori-feldstein.