Nobody clicked the feature we spent three months building. Our tourist app had an info button for venue stories, map overlays, and saving/sharing tools. We were convinced newcomers needed these capabilities. Then we watched users scroll past everything and bounce within seconds.
“Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers” explains why: consumers irrationally overvalue what they have by a factor of three, while companies overvalue innovations by the same factor (Gourville, 2006). This creates a 9x mismatch between what product managers think users want and what users need.
Why Feature Creep Happens
Feature creep is functionality accumulation driven by internal conviction rather than validated needs. Gourville identifies the mechanism: developers “operate in a world where their innovation is the reference point” and become convinced their product works, unable to see it from the consumer’s perspective (Gourville, 2006).
The psychological driver runs deeper. Having invested months building an info button, we’d endowed it with inflated value simply by creating it. Users had endowed simple scrolling—their status quo—with equal overvaluation. We overvalued our feature by 3x, users overvalued frictionless scrolling by 3x, creating a 9x gap that manifested as zero clicks.
The Compounding Costs
Feature creep creates cascading problems, wasting engineering resources on features users avoid. It creates adoption barriers: each feature requiring a click registers as a loss to users assessing innovations “in terms of what they gain and lose relative to those existing products” (Gourville, 2006). It obscures product vision—our info button competed with our core value proposition rather than enhancing it.
Closing the Gap Through Subtraction
The reading’s key insight: innovations succeed when they “offer great benefits but require minimal behavior change” (Gourville, 2006). Instead of adding features, we eliminated friction entirely.
Our solution: remove the button. As users scroll for their next venue, the story now appears automatically before the next option loads. No new behavior required; users keep scrolling, but see the story. This closed the 9x gap by eliminating the 3x resistance factor from behavior change.
The reading validates this through Toyota’s Prius, which “provides drivers with both the traditional internal-combustion engine and an innovative, self-charging electric engine,” resulting in “a driving experience that is virtually identical to that of a gasoline-only car” (Gourville, 2006). Toyota didn’t ask drivers to change behaviors—they eliminated behavior change while delivering innovation. We applied the same principle: keep the scroll, embed the story.
The Validation Principle
Product managers avoid feature creep through validation before implementation by observing user behavior. We thought users wanted more buttons. They wanted less friction and more content. Companies must understand “what kind of change they are demanding of consumers” (Gourville, 2006) before engineering investment.
Feature creep stems from developers adopting innovations as their status quo, then building to address gaps visible only from that distorted reference point. As Gourville notes, developers “expect consumers to see the same value in their innovations that they see” (Gourville, 2006).
The antidote: recognizing the 9x mismatch is predictable and manageable through ruthless subtraction, not enthusiastic addition.
