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Karthik Vijay is a rare all-rounder with 20+ years of experience, specializing in Architecture, Engineering, Leadership, and Productivity.

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Building Features vs. Building Trust

Bulding new features - false economy

TL;DR

Many teams fall into the trap of prioritising ✨ shiny new features ✨over fixing bugs and improving system resiliency in existing features. At first glance, this seems more desirable — more features mean more value for users. But in reality, Building features without Building trust is a false economy 💸 for three main reasons.

  1. Risk of losing existing customers: If you focus on attracting new users while neglecting existing ones, you risk losing the customers who already trust you — shrinking your overall base.
  2. Time lost to production issues: Teams end up spending more time firefighting than creating value for users.
  3. Accumulated tech debt slows down newer features: Bugs and reliability issues often stem from shortcuts taken during development. Over time, these shortcuts pile up as technical debt, making every new feature slower and harder to build.

Top 5 symptoms you are building features, not building trust

Building features focuses on delivering visible, tangible updates that excite users and stakeholders. Building trust goes a step further: it combines those new features with a resilient, reliable product that users can depend on. Features alone may attract attention, but without stability and proactive maintenance, trust erodes — and user confidence declines. True success comes from balancing both: delivering new capabilities while ensuring the system consistently works as expected.

  1. Frequent outages or downtime: Users experience crashes, slow performance, or system errors more often than acceptable.
  2. Rising customer complaints: Support tickets, negative reviews, and user frustration are increasing despite new feature releases.
  3. Your own team avoids the product: 🚩 This is a major red flag. If you can`t convince your own staff to be interested in your product, then it`s time for some serious soul searching.
  4. Your user base is declining: Despite frequent updates, adoption remains low and users are losing confidence in the product.
  5. Technical debt piling up: Code becomes harder to maintain, and each new feature takes longer to develop due to unresolved issues.

Why do companies tend to prioritise new features?

Visible progress for stakeholders
  1. New features are easy to showcase to executives, boards, or investors.
  2. Quarterly KPIs and targets often measure feature velocity, not stability.
  3. Reliability work is often invisible — until you get on the leaderboard of downdetector
Use-it-or-lose-it funding
  1. Annual budgets often encourage teams to spend quickly on visible projects, like new features, to avoid losing funding in future cycles.
  2. Stability and maintenance work can get deprioritized, since it is less visible and harder to justify in a “spend it now” model.
Competitive pressure & speed to market
  1. Companies want to keep up with competitors and capture market share.
  2. Speed to market is often mistaken as more valuable than stability.
CapEx vs OpEx bias
  1. Feature development can sometimes be treated as capital expenditure (CapEx), meaning the cost is spread over multiple years in accounting. This makes new features look like a long-term investment.
  2. Bug fixes and maintenance are almost always operating expenses (OpEx), recorded immediately in the accounts. Because they reduce profits in the current period, they can be underappreciated by management, even though they are essential for product stability and user trust.
Cultural glamour of innovation
  1. Building shiny new features excites engineers and product teams.
  2. Fixing bugs and improving resiliency is less celebrated and undervalued.

What can be done about it?

  1. Track the right metrics: Measure reliability, downtime, and user-reported issues — not just feature velocity.
  2. Create visibility of issues: Use dashboards, monitoring tools, and reports to make bugs and resiliency problems visible to the team and stakeholders.
  3. Balance innovation with maintenance: Release new features alongside invisible work that prevents technical debt.
  4. Foster a culture of resilience: Celebrate teams that prevent failures and strengthen systems, not only those that ship new features.
  5. Hire the right leaders: Bring in leaders who prioritise both innovation and reliability, and who can champion a balanced approach across teams.

A personal example

Several years ago, my partner and I started using a budgeting app that automatically categorised our transactions and gave us a clear picture of our spending. It was brilliant — We could finally see how much was going to groceries versus, say, towards my single malts. For a while, things were going great.

Then I noticed something odd: our reported expenses were going down month after month, but our savings weren’t going up. After digging in, I realised the app was missing a bunch of transactions every month, which made our expenses look artificially low. I flagged this to the company, and quickly discovered I wasn’t the only customer experiencing the issue.

But month after month, nothing changed. The figures were still wrong, while the company spent its time making small cosmetic touch-ups and introducing new features instead of fixing the core problem. As a customer, it was infuriating. I didn’t need polish — I needed accuracy. The worst part? I had no idea how long the numbers had been wrong, and it was clear the company didn’t either. If an app can’t get the basics right, how can I trust anything it tells me?

After months of waiting in vain, I’d had enough. I shut down my account and took my business elsewhere. Here’s the truth: if you don’t build trust, all the new features in the world won’t save you — customers will walk away. Trying to attract new users while ignoring broken fundamentals is like pouring water into a leaky bucket: in the end, you’ll end up with less than before.

Conclusion

It’s easy to criticise companies and leaders for prioritising new features while resiliency issues remain, but the reality is often more nuanced. Teams face pressure to deliver visible results, keep up with competitors, and meet short-term goals. The solution isn’t to choose one over the other — there needs to be a balance. High-priority bugs and resiliency issues should have a clear plan for resolution, while teams continue building new features to attract and retain customers.