Feature addiction is exacerbated by VC. Without real consequences to a poorly planned product roadmap due to the years of runway afforded by massive funding rounds, entire orgs fall into the “one more feature” cycle and never focus enough on measuring success in terms of real dollars. No one knows what went wrong when all the money is gone and devs/designers/PMs rinse and repeat at a new well-funded startup.
This actually isn’t true. VCs don’t want companies to build features, they want companies to listen to users maniacally and find product-market fit, then focus on growth (and/or revenue) like mad. That companies focus on features is a management issue and a sign of a failing company, not a sign that VC is somehow bad.
I agree that the issue is a problem of management. Though without oodles of cash to wash away missteps, poor management would be much more obvious. The ability to distill user feedback into the minimum number of valuable feature enhancements is what sets successful product orgs apart from failed ones. When cash is largely not a constraint, the tendency is to build exactly what each customer has said they want rather than try to come up with succinct improvements. The result is often bulky products that cost a fortune to maintain and only appeal to small number of customers.
VC is good if used correctly. But dumping wads of cash into a company to develop a product that isn’t capital intensive (like web or mobile tech) has the tendency to create bloated product orgs which optimize for the wrong things.
