Dear Project Manager: No One Cares About Your Features
As project managers and product owners, we think about features a lot. Features are neat! They provide us with that “wow factor” executives crave, whatever that is. I am a decade into a career in design and development and I still don’t know how to define “wow factor”, but I can define a “feature”. A feature is, by definition: “a distinctive attribute or aspect of something”. Within a product, we typically want our features to provide value. That value can be intrinsic or extrinsic, and is not always expressed on the surface. This presents a problem with our relationship with features as software developers: we often think of them in terms of user interfaces (UI). In so doing, we are limiting ourselves, and our products.