12 signs you're working in a feature factory
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
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.
So the part that is missing from your work experience it sounds like is if you add a feature that doesn't meet these money metrics what do you do? Do you just say lets leave it there, and build another feature or do you question the hypothesis that lead you down that route?
If you question your hypothesis then I think you are not a feature factory, because creating a new hypothesis might not be related at all to feature creation. However, if you decide to ignore your results and the hypothesis that got you there then most likely you move onto the next feature because that's really your only good option for revenue growth. The latter happens A LOT in large companies, and start-ups. It's more fun to build things then to think about why you are building them it seems.
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.
TL;DR, the article makes a good point, but I'd like to see more nuance, I guess.