Yesterday I read not one but two separate posts about removing features from products (sorry - no links right now as I am on BB only). This is a crucial topic for any software product / web service. In the physical world there are limits to creating monstrosities by piling on too many features. Buildings will collapse if you add too many floors to the top. Planes won’t fly if you load them up with too much stuff.

In software the only limits to complexity appear to be what the developers can wrap their minds around. That is generally way more than endusers can stomach. Especially on larger products where individual developers have a bit of “the elephant is a …” experience from working on one part of the service, whereas the enduser needs to deal with the entire elephant!

So in the absence of physical constraints on featuritis, where can restraint or even removal come from? For one-developer projects the answer is easy. But the second you have more than one person involved it gets much harder: “Hey, that’s *my* feature - I spent xx hours building that.” Usability testing will be a great help - but ultimately it is critical to have a product or design lead who can act as a benevolent dictator.

Yesterday I read not one but two separate posts about removing features from products (sorry - no links right now as I am on BB only). This is a crucial topic for any software product / web service. In the physical world there are limits to creating monstrosities by piling on too many features. Buildings will collapse if you add too many floors to the top. Planes won’t fly if you load them up with too much stuff.

In software the only limits to complexity appear to be what the developers can wrap their minds around. That is generally way more than endusers can stomach. Especially on larger products where individual developers have a bit of “the elephant is a …” experience from working on one part of the service, whereas the enduser needs to deal with the entire elephant!

So in the absence of physical constraints on featuritis, where can restraint or even removal come from? For one-developer projects the answer is easy. But the second you have more than one person involved it gets much harder: “Hey, that’s *my* feature - I spent xx hours building that.” Usability testing will be a great help - but ultimately it is critical to have a product or design lead who can act as a benevolent dictator.