It’s Time for ‘Maximum Viable Product’
> <i>And you can understand why it happens! Developers love to develop; marketers want new stuff to market. Adding new features, shipping new code, is fun and exciting. Merely maintaining a successful app? Bleah. So dull. That drives a lot of feature creep, right there.</i><p>> <i>The thing is, we can usefully flip this concept on its head! What if more developers developed a sense for the “maximum” number of things a product should do — and stopped there?</i><p>I'm sorry, but the author misunderstands entirely the reason for feature creep. It generally has nothing whatsoever to do with "fun" or developers "wanting to develop" or marketers "wanting to stuff to market".<p>Rather it has to do with segments of customers genuinely needing a given feature, and they won't buy the product unless it has the feature.<p>There's the old quote about how 80% of the people only use 20% of the features -- but then the punchline is that they're <i>all using a different 20%</i>.<p>That screenshot of all the Word toolbars? Guess what. There are different user segments that <i>actually use each one of those toolbars</i>. Yup.<p>So the idea that there is a "maximum" number of things a product should do, that can be known in advance, is sheer rubbish. If you're a business and you want to make money and you'll profitably sell to more customers if you can build in a new feature, then you do it.<p>Why would any company restrict itself to an arbitrary "maximum" and leave money on the table...?