Stop competing on features

Competing on features is the road to feature bloat, poor usability and increased frustration for users, developers and project stakeholders.

I've been taking an increased interest in the "tech startup" trend that has been occurring over the past few years and this concept is especially pertinent for anyone trying to make a success of a startup. If your startup is going to take on Goliath corp. then feature parity should absolutely not be the goal.

I'd even argue that if it's possible to compete on a single key feature and ignore everything else (which is likely to be falling somewhere within Pareto's principle) then you're very likely to be able to offer a far simpler, far superior product.

Of course there is a lot of context dependence on such a statement but certainly for a startups consideration then it's much easier to compete on a single feature than many. I've written similar thoughts on the Moov2 on Business Software blog in the past but it's recently returned to my attention.