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> Our prospective customers tell us things like "we can't sign up until you support X number of features," and my boss and the founder believe that our number 1 indication of success is the downward trend of X. I’m reading this as a pattern of prospective customers asking for more features,
and the downward trend being that of the number of “missing” features. As your installed base grows, the number of features supported and requested
will tend to grow faster than the number of users grows. Users will always want more features. Even if you support 3 ways of doing the same thing, users will want more ways of doing it, ways that better fit their in-house work flow, or the work flow of some other software they have used elsewhere or in the past. Your boss and the founder are in growth mode. They want more users and want more features to get more users, of course. But, at some point, the number of features and the number of interactions of those features will start to become a burden on the company, unless it is successful beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, and can afford to hire faster than the burden grows. You, and your boss and the founder, should start thinking about a future time when you can feel that the product is nearly feature-complete, and thinking about
what the natural limits of its feature set might be. If you start that now,
you have a chance of having a coherent set of features in a supportable whole. |