Feature Creep - What It Is and How to Avoid It?

Feature creep is the tendency of the features of a product to change or expand over time due to constantly changing requirements, ultimately hurting the product’s value.

When unchecked, feature creep can lead to:

1. Increased cost and longer timelines for feature development and delivery
2. Reduced product quality due to feature overload and complexity
3. Poorer customer experiences as they won’t get the value they were promised
4. Decreased competitiveness in the marketplace and a lower rate of business growth

Before going into the article, it is important to settle the debate of feature creep vs scope creep.

Feature creep occurs when too many (rich) features are added to the product which overextends that particular functionality of the product. It often occurs when stakeholders continually add new feature requests without considering the impact on user experience.

Difference between feature creep and scope creep

Scope creep refers to the uncontrolled expansion of the project’s scope which happens when the overall objectives, deliverables, and business goals are not properly managed. It makes the project too expensive and delayed.

Feature creep is a type of scope creep. The former is driven by stakeholders and the lack of a data-backed approach of the product team and the latter is caused by a lack of clear objectives, poorly defined goals, and inefficient processes.

Now, let’s take a look at the underlying reasons that lead to feature creep.

What are the causes of feature creep?

Feature creep in software development decreases the desirability of a product. Here are the four causes that drive it:

• Lack of clarity over user requirements: If the developers are unclear about the pain points and expectations of their users, they might add features that their users don’t need.
• Changes in market conditions or customer demand: Disruptive technologies and tools change the needs of customers. To retain customers and market position, brands modify their products which sometimes results in feature creep.
• Ineffective collaboration within the team: Feature creep in product management can also result when the efforts of various members of the product team aren’t aligned.
• Improper prioritization of feature requests and updates: For example, prioritizing the development of a dark theme in a messaging app over fixing a bug can result in feature creep leading to user churn.

One of the best feature creep examples is Microsoft Word 2000: 

The then-product team of Microsoft continued to expand the scope of the product by adding features as they discovered new user requirements without considering the volume of users who will actually use it. This led to the creation of a feature-loaded tool that made it more challenging for the end users to access the core value of the product.

The image below illustrates how dangerous it can get if you keep adding features just because of stakeholders’ recommendations: 

This approach leaves out the most crucial component of SaaS product management — users — and adds unnecessary features leading to a complex product.

In simple terms, feature creep is like cancer for software products. Just like cancer results from the uncontrolled growth of cells, feature creep is the consequence of the overdevelopment of features.

Let’s see how you can avoid feature creep during product management.

How to avoid feature creep (tips, tools, and resources)

1. Reevaluate your product’s mission and vision

The product mission clarifies who it is for and what value it offers to the end user. The product vision reflects the long-term and aspiration mission of the product. The mission and vision answer a very important question — what is the core value of a certain product or feature?

To avoid feature creep, it is essential to not add features that don’t add to the core value of your product.

Since markets and your users’ requirements change, shifting the core value of your product sometimes becomes inevitable. However, before doing so, it is important to redefine your product’s mission and vision.

For example, Facebook started with a bold mission statement “Move fast and break things” which eventually evolved to the one below as they rebranded to Meta.

2. Finalize a PRD and MRD before each sprint

A market requirements document contains the what and why of a product and a product requirements document describes how it will be developed and measured. Finalizing these strategic and tactic documents will give you tangible guidelines to improve your product by.

An MRD and PRD also play a pivotal role in bringing everyone, including the stakeholders, to the same page which serves as a common reference point. Any ambiguity and confusion in any stage of the product life cycle can be cleared up with these two documents, helping you avoid feature creep.

Zeda.io provides a collaborative workspace for product teams to create and manage such documents. You can start from scratch with a blank template, import an existing document, or use a readymade template:

3. Test your hypotheses before prioritizing a product/feature

In general, the development of every feature or product starts with a hypothesis — the users will love it and it will make the business more profitable. To ensure that you remain within the scope of the product’s vision and mission, validate your hypothesis before building anything.

Zeda.io helps product teams map out the user journey and create wireframes collaboratively to soft-test their ideas which helps them validate their hypotheses.

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You can also put working prototypes and minimum viable products (MVPs) in front of your users to gather actionable feedback. This will prevent you from adding anything to your product that adds little value and more complexity.

4. Critically examine the priority of each initiative

Incorrect prioritization of initiatives such as tasks, bug fixes, and feature requests results in a product with a poorer user experience. If unchecked, it can start a domino effect where each iteration of the product becomes progressively more complex and less valuable.

It is, therefore, essential for product managers to quantify the importance of each potential initiative through user and marketing data.

Zeda.io helps product managers prioritize their list of initiatives with the RICE Prioritization method.

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You can also customize the prioritization framework based on your preferences to minimize the possibility of feature creep.

5. Keep everyone on the same page with a product roadmap

Product roadmap is a communication tool for the cross-functional product team, senior management, and stakeholders. It maps the product’s development journey and connects action items to your strategic goals.

An outdated roadmap cannot accurately guide the product team and is one of the biggest causes of feature creep in product development.

You can create multiple product roadmaps with Zeda.io and share them with various teams with custom permissions to keep everyone updated about and get inputs on the product’s growth trajectory.

6. Use an adaptive product development workflow

An adaptive product development workflow allows you to be responsive to changes in user requirements and market demands. This agility in your product management process allows you to retain the desirability of your product and the profitability of your business even when:

1. The market changes quickly and drastically
2. Feature creep occurs

You can adopt the principles of agile product development to make your product development workflow more efficient and proactive to changes.

7. Make every process data-backed

Data-backed processes eliminate the guesswork and hence reduce the risks associated with adding new features to the product. Monitoring product and business performance metrics throughout the product management process will keep you informed on whether your users are getting the value they are looking for.

With multiple KPIs for product management, it can get difficult for product managers to monitor all of them to avoid feature creep. Zeda.io simplifies that by bringing data from different product analytics tools such as Data Studio and Mixpanel.

8. Have retrospective meetings after each sprint

Retrospective meetings help you stick to the scope of the product based on its vision and mission while keeping the business goals in mind. Here, product teams evaluate whether the new features are delivering value to the product.

After every sprint, ask yourself the following questions:

• What did the user want? (What was the problem you were trying to solve?)
• Does the new feature meet the requirements? (Did you create an actual solution?)

Always remember the golden rule — if a feature doesn’t solve any problem, kill it.

You can uncover a lot about your users and their pain points which will help you update your product’s mission, vision, MRD, and PRD (see 1 and 2 above).

Summing up

Feature creep occurs when a team overextends the scope of their product (or a feature thereof) leading to increased complexity and bad user experience. It diminishes the utility of the product in the short term and eventually makes it unprofitable.

You can avoid feature creep by adopting a data-backed approach to product development where each of your team’s hypotheses is verified before they turn into action items on the product roadmap.

It is also crucial for product managers to equip themselves and their teams with the right tools to understand whether the newly added features are delivering any value to their users.

Zeda.io is a super app for product teams that has all the tools you need to develop features that your users need from ideation to delivery. You can use the native features of the app or bring your existing tools to Zeda.io through integrations.

Start your free trial today.

Suggested Read: What Does it Mean to be a Product-led Company?

FAQs

• What is meant by feature creep?

Answer: Feature creep is when you continue to add more features to your product or make them richer which leads to a complicated product that doesn’t provide much value to its end users.

• What is an example of feature creep?

Answer: Let’s say a product team wants to build basic accounting software. With time, if they continue to add features for other functionalities like invoicing, inventory management, and payroll management, the software will take longer, cost more, become complex, and might disappoint users.

• How do I stop feature creep?

Answer: Establish the scope of your product clearly and ensure that every sprint is data-backed.

• What are the types of scope creep?

Answer: The four types of scope creep are: business, effort, hope, and feature.

• What is scope creep in agile?

Answer: It is the resulting complexity of the end product and dips in user satisfaction due to the continuous addition of action items in the product roadmap which weren’t originally in the sprint or product backlog.

• How do you prevent scope creep?

Answer: Clearly outline the scope of the project and update them regularly, validate your hypotheses with data before adding action items to the roadmap, ensure that all the team members are aware of the project’s mission and vision, and always focus on delivering value to your users.