Feature Bandage Rabbit Hole
What happens when development teams skip critical steps like creating prototypes, gathering feedback, or iterating on designs? They end up with solutions that have deeper issues and compromised UX. The sensible thing would be to resolve these issues, but in the race to the next delivery, often these issues are left unresolved, reaching a point where resolving them becomes a mammoth task that teams either can't take up (due to time restrictions) or don't want to take up (because they think they can manage them).
To mitigate this, teams often resort to what I call "feature bandages." This phenomenon involves adding new features to hide deeper issues or make the product seem more valuable. Instead of addressing core problems, dev teams commit to these quick fixes, further leading themselves deeper into issues, resulting in a bloated, hard-to-manage product, and a vicious feature bandage rabbit hole.
I am reminded of a particular product that I once consulted. They had severe performance issues on one of the pages, which had multiplied over time and demanded total code refactoring and major architectural changes. Instead of addressing the issues, they had added more clicks to the user flow with page loaders in between to buy more time to load the rest of the info in the background. (Full marks for ingenuity, right?)
Of course, this didn't work for the end users who got frustrated because now, along with enduring bad performance, they had to click multiple times for something they used to do in a couple of clicks. You might wonder who would approve of this. But that's the curse of the feature bandage rabbit hole. It starts with something small and borderline reasonable but, over time, grows into an incomprehensible mess. The same was the case with this team.
As they looked to me for a solution, I had to tell them straight that there was no other way than correcting the mistakes. After much ado, we went ahead with discussing the impact analysis, required changes, release strategy, etc.
The only way out of the feature bandage rabbit hole is to experiment, embrace early failures, prioritize feedback, and always make changes when they are necessary. If they can't be made right away, it's important to prioritize them in the backlog and accommodate them before it's too late. Check out more on this topic here: What Are First Draft Solutions and Why Do We Need to Get Rid of Them?.