I was called in to consult on a project recently where the developers, and the product managers, had confused the features they were building with the value they were delivering.
The developers had written an initial integration to a new marketing channel. The goal was to deliver something minimal, but high quality, that they could get in front of customers in under 6 weeks. The project hadn’t specified any UI for the customers, and the initial version offered users no feedback. Customers could set up a campaign, but they couldn’t find out if it had completed, or how many people had clicked on a link.
With two weeks left of the original six week project, product managers stepped in with a 12 week project to add reporting. The reporting may have been beautiful, intuitive, and powerful, but none of that mattered. The project’s value was in the new marketing channel, not the report. Having a polished report that would make the value easy to understand was a feature.
The project owners decided not to go with my advice and release the feature with a minimal data table report. Instead a 6 week project became an 18 week project, and delivered no customer value for an additional 3 months. When customers finally got their hands on the polished report, they didn’t like it and needed revisions.
Months were lost, and customers ultimately got less value, because the team had confused the features they were building with the value they were delivering. An MVP today is worth infinitely more than a highly polished guess in 3 months.