The more features you add

I have a related takeaway: that companies over-hire and over-build in an attempt to improve the curves seen in this article.

Products like Slack have arguably been shuffling deck chairs around adding features that supposedly attract more valuable enterprise customers. They’ve also been struggling to make the UI more intuitive despite tossing in so many features.

I’m torn on this a little bit. Features like Slack Huddles are honestly pretty good, something I’d prefer using over many competing tools.

On the other hand, it’s a feature that wildly expands the scope of the application and must result in hundreds of additional employees on being retained at Salesforce and higher hosting costs for the customers that use it.

So, has it resulted in an increase in customer lifetime value? Maybe it does, I don’t know.

Then I look at some other features like Canvas where I can’t figure out why they’re there. They’re just bologna-slapped on the wall in hopes that each feature makes the value proposition look better.

I think fondly about the polar opposite company like Craigslist where a small team focuses on what they’re good at rather than continually expanding scope. But then again, who would I rather invest in?