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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, this approach is a false economy 💸 for three main reasons.

  1. Risk of losing existing customers: If you hope to grow your customer base with new features but neglect existing features, you risk losing current customers — which can shrink your overall user base.
  2. Time lost to production issues: Teams end up spending too much time firefighting production issues, time that could have been used to create value for users.
  3. Accumulated tech debt slows down newer features: The more technical debt you accumulate over time, the longer it takes to build new features.

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.

Conclusion

It’s easy to be critical of companies and leaders for focusing on new features when they have resiliency issues to fix, but the reality is often more nuanced. Teams face pressure to deliver visible results, keep up with competitors, and meet short-term goals. The goal isn’t to choose one over the other though — there needs to be a balance, with a clear plan to fix high priority resiliency issues and bugs, whilst at the same time striving to build newer features.