Fighting Featuritis

As a product grows, most of the outcome lies in the ability to solve even more of the customers’ problems. There’s a dark side to this approach, though.

A good Product Owner says no. She guards the strategy and focus of the product by saying no not only to bad ideas and distractions, but to good ideas as well. She lets only the best ideas in. But she would need real superpowers to keep all the unwanted functionality out of her product. A disease, called featuritis, always slowly sneaks in.

Fortunately, there is a way out – getting rid of functionality. It’s a painful way for sure. But it’s feasible and, in the end, a healthy thing for the product.

This is where Kentico stands right now.

After 10 great years, we are fighting a mild case of featuritis. In the past decade, we added many features that we thought were important. However, some of them are no longer needed, as the market needs changed and some features never saw the adoption we anticipated. We want to move forward with our new functionality, because we know that it has the potential to help many of our customers. And to be able to help you the best we can, we have to free ourselves from the chains of the not-so-useful functionality that once looked great but may no longer be needed so much today.

That’s why in Kentico 9 we plan to abandon:

• Wireframes
• Meta-weblog API
• Trackbacks
• Document Library
• Old SharePoint connector
• Project management
• ASP .NET 4.0 support
• Lightbox web parts
• Most of Kentico inherited web parts
• SKM menu web part
• CMS tree menu web part

This will help us focus on the things you’ve been asking for:

• Improving our continuous integration capabilities
• Improving our MVC development model
• Defining best practices on how to use what we currently have

See our roadmap for more details.

We believe that the majority of you won’t be affected by the changes. But we know that some of you currently use the to-be-abandoned functionality. And we don’t want to abandon you. We will provide best practices and packages to help you follow us on the path to better customer experience.

This article starts a series where we will dive into the details of every change we plan to make. If you, however, already see any functionality that you wouldn’t  want to see going away, please let us know in the comments below.

We are confident that this step is the right one and that it leads to the future in which Kentico is the best solution for our customers.

http://devnet.kentico.com/articles/fighting-featuritis