The Feature Factory

Gokul Rajaram has seen the same pattern destroy product teams everywhere.

'The founder becomes too tactical and disempowers their team. They basically just tell the engineers what to build. That leads to teams that are just shipping feature after feature without truly solving problems.'

He calls this the 'feature factory.' A culture where everyone is proud of what they shipped, but nobody knows if it actually changed anything.

'If a feature is shipped, but it doesn't change customer behavior at all, is it really a feature? It's like a tree falling in the forest.'

The alternative: give your team problems to solve, not tasks to complete.

This maps directly to parenting. You can say 'clean your room' (feature). Or you can say 'your friends are coming over and there's no place to play - what should we do?' (problem).

One creates compliance. The other creates problem-solvers.

The goal isn't getting things done. It's raising humans who see problems and figure out how to solve them.