A product designer explains how to choose between building new features and fixing existing ones. The key: weigh impact against effort, and remember that technical debt eventually costs more to clean up than to build fresh. Sometimes a revolutionary feature justifies skipping maintenance, but balance usually wins.
Chapters
What's your approach to balancing business goals and user need? You have to have the business goal in mind. If the business doesn't make money, you won't be able to satisfy the user need, namely because you won't be able to financially keep your user experience team. So if you don't have— if you're not satisfying the business goal, like, so now we have to argue upkeep and quality versus quantity. Should we be building more features or should we be fixing our current features? And really, I think you have to take both of them into consideration and also some scalability because that will adjust, that will affect the business, a long-term business strategy. Let me, let me get into more detail here. So let's say we have a feature, we have an MVP, we have a product that already is doing well, and so we're thinking about building a new feature, but there's the opportunity to fix our current feature set so that it's faster and so that adding new features will be easier, right? So the long-term will be better. So I think for me, it's usually push for scalability because then once we have the ability to add more features, we can add more features faster and thus create more value faster. Kind of goes down to the same, same way to shortest job. Is the impact of the new feature and the level of effort greater or lower than fixing what we currently have? But after a certain point, if you've tacked on too many things and now every feature has significantly more effort because you don't clean them up, at a certain point, the effort for cleaning it up would be greater than creating new features. So I think it takes, it's a balance. You have to consider what the new feature is and how much impact. Is it, was it world-changing? Is it revolutionary? Is it gonna keep your company from collapsing? You may need to go with that new feature compared to fixing your old features or some of the, you know, focusing on some of the user need that hasn't, you know, that's kind of smaller on the impact scale.
