The feature trap

How product teams confuse building with validating

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Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash

The urge to build feels older and more reflexive than the thinking meant to govern it. There’s a particular comfort in being busy. One that is very easily mistaken for being useful.

The reality is most teams don’t truly strategize on what to build. They respond to a signal, a call, that it’s time to build something.

In the 1960s a Swedish biologist named Lars Wilsson set out to learn what actually makes a beaver build. What he found is that beavers don’t build dams in response to water, to a leak, but in response to the sound of water.

Play a recording of a running stream and a beaver will dutifully pack mud and sticks over the speaker, despite no leak anywhere in sight. Run an actual pipe leaking silently through its lodge, and it will leave the real leak untouched and keep building over the speaker.

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The beaver hears running water and builds. Whether there is an actual leak is, to the beaver, negligable. \| Photo by Derek Otway on Unsplash

The beaver builds for the cue, the sound that says build, not the actual problem that needs solving. This is how a lot of teams build, too: in response to a cue. A roadmap. A planning cycle. A full backlog. A CEO’s request. Not any actual problem or real value.