Products with a ton of features tend to make the user experience worse for most people. Despite this, most products (especially enterprise ones) eventually end up with “feature bloat.”
While feature bloat might not necessarily make you lose your top enterprise customers (they’re the ones who requested all these features anyways), it alienates the vast majority of your normal, non-power users. This can create a vacuum of innovation that emerging competitors can take advantage of (e.g., Atlassian vs. Trello, which ultimately led to an acquisition)
Users and stakeholders always advocate for new features, but they rarely tell you to remove a feature. This doesn’t mean removing features won’t improve the product.
The pain of losing a feature is immediate, but the benefits aren’t apparent until later down the road. In this article, I’ll explain why feature bloat is bad and how to remove features without pissing off your users.
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