Featuritis and Creeping Featurism
Featuritis = the (seemingly unavoidable, highly infectious) business disease whose main symptom is creeping featurism — the tendency to keep adding features beyond all reason. Named ~1976. Illustrated by the Lego motorcycle bloating from 15 pieces (no instructions needed) to 29 (instructions required).
Why it happens — three forces push every successful product toward more features:
- Existing customers ask for more functions.
- Competitors add features → pressure to match and exceed.
- Sales decline as the market saturates → add "enhancements" to drive upgrades.
Marketing can always justify adding features, but there is no budget or call to remove old ones.
The competition trap (Youngme Moon, Different)
Matching every competitor feature-for-feature makes all products the same → no reason to prefer one. Better strategy: strengthen your strengths, not patch your weaknesses; market the strong points; be merely "good enough" elsewhere. Good design requires leadership to withstand marketing pressure and keep the product consistent, coherent, understandable.
"Customer obsessed" (Jeff Bezos / Amazon)
Focus entirely on customer needs, ignore competitors and traditional marketing; usually only sustainable while the founder is CEO. Once profit is put above customer concern, quality deteriorates and customers desert.
Relationship
Featuritis is the practical engine of the The Paradox of Technology and a force opposing Human-Centered Design (HCD). It is a property of incremental innovation gone wrong.
Confidence
1.0 — explicit named concept.
Sources: ["DOET ch.7 'Featuritis: A Deadly Temptation' p.261-264"]