I'm not sure what this means... what's the alternative? I guess I've never worked at a place where we had the time to refactor every feature or overengineer and measure the impact of everything, the reality of money is more important than feeling good.<p>I'm not sure what's a good example of the opposite of this pattern, maybe a company like Google? Given how aggressively and rapidly they make their products worse for no reason and the contempt they seem to have for anyone who isn't a Google employee this makes me think maybe the factory is a better overall pattern. I mean maybe the engineers are a bit happier, but overall the Google model is a terrible strategy for products, masked by the 90% market share money making machine.
I think whether this is a problem or not for your business depends on the size of the userbase and the distance from the people actually using it. Small software platforms pretty much have to be "feature factories" because they're meeting a niche need that none of the big players are willing to develop for. The product is whatever helps makes its users more productive or happier in this case.<p>But if you have something with a huge impact, then throwing new features is not good if you don't know how helpful they may be to the end user.<p>TL;DR, the article makes a good point, but I'd like to see more nuance, I guess.
I do not quite understand why the article calls it a "problem" at the end. I work in a feature factory. Business is good, employees love working at the company. What more could you ask for?