The Feature Checklist Fallacy
A common path to product mediocrity begins with a seemingly harmless request: the demand for more features. It starts with a competitor comparison, a checklist from a sales prospect, or a desire to close every perceived gap. This thinking leads to bloated products, diluted value propositions, and a team perpetually trapped in a feature factory.
The underlying belief is that a better product is one that simply does more. This is a fallacy. If adding every "missing" feature was the key to success, the market would be dominated by cluttered, swiss-army-knife products that nobody loves.
The truth is, building a successful product is not an exercise in accumulation. It is an exercise in focus. The most iconic products are defined not by the length of their feature lists, but by the ruthless clarity of their purpose.
Identify Your Uncompromising Core
The most difficult, and most important, job in product strategy is to identify the handful of attributes that represent the uncompromising core of your product. What are the two or three things that it must do exceptionally well? These are the elements that create genuine value and differentiation. Everything else is noise.
If your product needs to be good at everything to succeed, it is likely not innovative. It's an iteration, a marginal improvement at best. Truly great products are often unapologetically "bad" at things that don't matter to their core mission. They make opinionated trade-offs, and their strength comes from what they choose not to do.
Escape the Feature Trap
This principle is visible in the DNA of many successful B2B products.
Consider Slack in its early days. It was great at three things:
- Instant, channel-based communication. It was a fundamentally new way for teams to communicate in real-time.
- Deep, powerful integrations. It became the central notification hub for a team's entire tool stack.
- A fully searchable archive. Every conversation became a permanent, accessible piece of company knowledge.
At the same time, it was mediocre or even bad at many other things. Threaded conversations were a known weakness for years. Video calling was clunky. File management was rudimentary. But none of that mattered, because Slack was so exceptional at its core purpose that users were willing to forgive its other shortcomings.
Or look at Figma. It launched into a crowded market and won by being great at:
- Real-time, multiplayer collaboration. Seeing multiple cursors moving in a single design file felt like magic.
- Browser-based accessibility. There were no installs, no version control nightmares, and no platform lock-in.
- A superior vector editing engine. Its "vector networks" were a fundamentally better way to draw, a detail that mattered deeply to its core users.
Initially, Figma's prototyping features were far less advanced than competitors, and it lacked a plugin ecosystem. It wasn't a "good" replacement for the entire design toolchain, but it was a "great" tool for collaborative design, and that was enough to win.
Applying the Framework
This principle is more than a historical observation; it is an active framework for making decisions. For any product you are building, you must be able to answer these questions with painful clarity:
- What are the three, and only three, features or attributes that define our product's greatness?
- Are we dedicating at least 80% of our resources to making these three things world-class?
- What are we intentionally choosing to be bad at to protect our focus on the core?
If you cannot answer these questions, you are likely drifting toward the feature checklist trap.
Conclusion
Building a great product is an act of strategic sacrifice. It requires having the discipline to ignore the noise of endless feature requests and the courage to focus your team's energy on a few essential elements. It's about understanding that you don't win by being good at everything. You win by being truly exceptional at the things that matter most.