Beyond Features

The term "product team" has become ubiquitous. Organizations often pride themselves on having agile, product-focused teams dedicated to delivering value. However, many of these teams operate under a critical misconception—they equate success with delivering features into production rather than solving meaningful customer problems. Instead of focusing on outcomes, they prioritize outputs. This misunderstanding reduces agile principles to mechanical processes, stripping them of their customer-centric essence.

True product teams are driven by a deep understanding of their customers' needs, desires, and pain points. They measure success not by the number of features released but by the impact those features have on customer satisfaction and business outcomes. I will explore the pitfalls of treating product teams as "feature factories," introducing metaphors to illustrate the essence of real product teams, and raising crucial questions to help teams transition toward genuine customer focus.

The Feature Factory Trap

The Assembly Line vs. The Artisan Workshop

Imagine two different kitchens. One operates like a fast-food chain, churning out burgers as quickly as possible based on a pre-defined menu. The other is an artisan bakery, experimenting with flavours, learning from customer preferences, and adapting recipes. While the fast-food chain may deliver consistent outputs, it rarely innovates or delights. In contrast, the artisan bakery crafts products with care, tailoring them to customer preferences and ensuring high satisfaction.

Many teams today resemble fast-food kitchens—feature factories focused solely on producing functionality at high speed. They prioritize velocity, release frequency, and backlog burn-down rates. Success, in their eyes, is shipping features rather than improving customer experiences.

Symptoms of the Feature Factory Approach:

• Metrics focused on activity rather than impact (e.g., story points completed rather than customer retention).
• Blind adherence to roadmaps without questioning whether features address real problems.
• Teams that celebrate deployments but fail to measure whether those deployments improved key business metrics.
• A lack of curiosity about customer behaviours, needs, and pain points.

The feature factory mindset leads to products that are cluttered, incoherent, and disconnected from user needs. Worse, it fosters disengagement, as teams feel like cogs in a machine rather than creative problem-solvers.

What Defines a Real Product Team?

The Chef vs. the Recipe Follower

Picture a chef who carefully selects ingredients, tastes dishes mid-preparation, and adjusts seasoning to perfection. Contrast this with someone who blindly follows recipes without ever tasting the food. A chef focuses on the dining experience and customer satisfaction, while a recipe follower simply executes steps.

Real product teams are like chefs—they iterate, experiment, and refine their work based on feedback. Instead of blindly implementing features, they ask meaningful questions:

• Why is our conversion rate dropping?
• What’s causing friction in our user flows?
• How do customers feel when using our product?
• Which features are truly valuable, and which are ignored?

Key Characteristics of Real Product Teams:

1. Customer Obsession: Constantly gather and analyze user feedback through interviews, surveys, and analytics.
2. Outcome-Oriented: Focus on business outcomes like revenue growth, user retention, and engagement instead of output metrics.
3. Collaboration Over Handoffs: Work closely with stakeholders, designers, and engineers to create cohesive solutions.
4. Experimentation Culture: Use A/B testing, prototypes, and MVPs to validate ideas before scaling them.
5. Data-Driven Decisions: Measure success with clear, relevant metrics tied to customer satisfaction and business goals.

Shifting Mindsets: From Outputs to Outcomes

The Gardener vs. the Builder

Builders follow blueprints to completion, measuring success by structural integrity. Gardeners, however, nurture plants, respond to changing conditions, and foster growth over time. Real product teams are gardeners—they continuously improve the product based on evolving customer needs rather than delivering a fixed blueprint.

Shifting from output-focused thinking requires teams to embrace uncertainty and value learning over perfection. Instead of asking, "What can we deliver next?" teams should ask:

• Why do we have so many dependencies slowing us down?
• Which parts of the product create the most delight for users?
• How can we simplify workflows to improve usability?
• Are we solving the right problems, or just building more features?

Challenges in Transitioning to a Product Mindset

1. Breaking the Habit of Feature Creep: Teams often feel pressure to deliver visible outputs to stakeholders. Overcoming this requires shifting conversations from timelines to value delivery.

2. Aligning Goals Across Functions: Sales, marketing, and engineering often operate in silos, focusing on their own metrics. Creating shared goals around customer outcomes fosters collaboration.

3. Cultivating Curiosity: Product teams need to learn to ask deeper questions about user behaviour and experiment with solutions rather than relying on assumptions.

Real-World Questions to Drive Change

To transition into genuine product teams, organizations should frequently ask:

Customer-Centric Questions:

• What do our users love about our product?
• What frustrates them the most?
• How are we validating that we’re solving the right problems?

Business Impact Questions:

• Why is churn increasing despite new features?
• What impact did our last release have on key metrics?
• Are we building solutions aligned with strategic goals?

Team Effectiveness Questions:

• Are we learning from experiments and iterating?
• How can we reduce dependencies and ship faster?
• Are we balancing discovery with delivery?

Real product teams are not defined by how many features they release but by how well they solve meaningful problems for their customers. Like chefs, artisans, and gardeners, they focus on crafting experiences, responding to feedback, and nurturing growth rather than following rigid plans. Transitioning from a feature factory to a customer-centric mindset requires asking better questions, fostering collaboration, and measuring outcomes instead of outputs.

In the end, the question every team must ask is not, "What did we build?" but rather, "What did we improve?" Only by shifting focus from activity to impact can teams truly embody the agile principles they claim to follow and deliver lasting value to their customers.