In his post Why Feature FOMO Stalls Product Innovation Brian Crofts discusses the many reasons why product teams tend to add a slew unnecessary features to a product. This issue hit close to home:

Pendo’s recent State of Product Leadership survey found that 77% of product teams are evaluated based on the number of features they ship. This gives product teams an implied incentive to add more, regardless of whether those features are being used and adopted.

I can only trust that this has changed by now, but when I worked at eBay product managers were measured by how many PRDs they wrote. The things didn’t even have to ship. The measure was literally “How many Word templates did you fill out this quarter?”

Instead, Brian proposes a better way:

Technology brands should hold their product teams accountable for metrics that have the greatest impact on success. Instead of the raw number of features shipped or revenue driven, metrics such as feature adoption, customer happiness, and customer engagement are critical. These measures point to which features are working now and help form longer-term rollout strategy.