The feature factory vs. the painkiller aisle
Why vendors keep selling vitamins while customers are in the ER
Tech vendors love to preach “customer obsession.” In practice, it’s a conveyor belt of half-baked gimmicks dressed up as innovation.
Every week, another vendor hurls a shiny new feature into the void—while customers quietly shop for something that actually stops their pain.
This isn’t just a gap between marketing and reality—it’s a full-blown market mismatch. On one side: companies hooked on the dopamine rush of shipping novelty. On the other hand, buyers are stuck in triage mode, hunting for solutions to problems that are bleeding time, budget, and patience.
The great misalignment
The modern tech roadmap is less a strategy than a stage performance. Your favorite SaaS tool announces AI integration. Your cloud dashboard now has customizable themes. Your FinOps platform just rolled out “predictive insights,” which—if you bother to read the docs—are really just yesterday’s cost anomaly alerts with a new coat of paint.
Meanwhile, in the customer’s world, the Wi-Fi is down in the warehouse, the API integration to a key supplier keeps failing at 3 a.m., and the budget is about to get cut by 15%. The feature dump doesn’t even graze the edge of these problems.
Why? Because vendors aren’t shipping for the customer—they’re shipping for the analyst report, the next funding round, or the internal KPI that says “features launched per quarter.” In the religion of velocity, it’s not about whether the thing matters. It’s about whether you shipped something.
And when every competitor is playing the same game, we get the Feature Factory arms race:
Ship to match whatever’s in the competitor’s press release.
Ship to justify the next price hike.
Ship so product marketing has a fresh bullet point for the sales deck.
Pain points are boring (but profitable)
There’s an open secret in product management: solving a real customer problem is messy and unsexy. It usually requires rethinking architecture, killing sacred-cow features, and saying “no” to the pet ideas of executives.
So instead, vendors gravitate toward what’s shiny:
Features you can demo in under two minutes at a conference booth.
Features that look good in a TechCrunch headline.
Features that make the quarterly “what’s new” webinar feel like progress.
But here’s the problem: customers don’t shop for features. They shop for relief.
If you’re in procurement or IT leadership, you don’t care that the new dashboard renders in React instead of Angular. You care that your team spends less time chasing invoice errors or fighting toolchain breakages.
The tragedy? The painkiller market is bigger and stickier than the vitamin market. Solve someone’s pain, and they’ll forgive mediocre UX or slow AI rollout. Give them a vitamin disguised as a painkiller, and they’ll drop you the second a competitor offers actual relief.
The survival economy has no patience
In the zero-interest-rate wonderland of the late 2010s, “we ship fast” was a competitive advantage. Investors loved to see relentless velocity. Buyers had budget slack to play with the new toys you dropped every month.
That world is dead.
Budgets are defensive now. Procurement officers are under pressure to justify every renewal. “Cool feature” has been replaced by “show me the cost reduction.” New integrations must replace legacy tools, not add to the pile. And no one wants to hear that the killer feature they need is on the roadmap for Q4 next year.
Here’s the inconvenient truth: shipping features for the sake of features no longer moves the needle in a survival economy. The buying decision now hinges on ROI math done in Excel, not on a product demo call.
If your shiny new feature doesn’t shorten that ROI column, it’s dead on arrival.
Here’s what nobody’s admitting
The SaaS and platform markets are overbuilt. In nearly every category—from DevOps to FinOps to generative AI—the supply of “feature-complete” tools exceeds the number of customers willing to churn. This forces vendors into two equally destructive patterns:
Over-serving existing customers – dumping more features into already bloated platforms in hopes of increasing “stickiness,” which ironically makes the product harder to use and easier to abandon.
Feature mimicry – copying whatever the market leader just shipped, regardless of whether it addresses a meaningful pain point.
Both burn time and engineering talent could be spent actually making the product less painful to use.
But this treadmill keeps spinning because it’s how product orgs have been incentivized for a decade. Product managers get promoted for delivering features on schedule, not for killing a bloated backlog or removing redundant workflows. Marketing teams are measured by engagement with “new feature” campaigns, not customer retention curves.
And leadership? They’re addicted to the press release dopamine hit.
When pain points and roadmaps collide
Sometimes a vendor does get dragged—kicking and screaming—into solving a real pain point. Usually, it’s because a major customer threatens to churn or a competitor makes a direct hit with a better solution.
But here’s the kicker: by the time that happens, the fix is more expensive and riskier than if the vendor had invested early. Technical debt, cultural inertia, and broken trust all make the solution harder to sell, even to existing customers.
Meanwhile, in the customer’s buying cycle, the stakes have shifted. A CIO evaluating tools in 2025 isn’t just looking for “best in category.” They’re asking:
Will this tool replace three others?
Will it lower my team’s operational load?
Will it scale without an expensive professional services contract?
If your feature roadmap can’t answer those questions in the affirmative, you’re not competing for the deal. You’re just performing for the analyst quadrant.
The case for killing features
Radical idea: stop shipping new features for a quarter. Use that time to:
Audit which features actually get used.
Deprecate the dead ones.
Invest in making the most painful workflows faster, cleaner, and more reliable.
Will your press releases dry up? Yes.
Will your analysts downgrade you for “lack of innovation”? Absolutely.
Will your customers notice? Oh, they’ll notice. And they’ll reward you with something even better than a high NPS score: contract renewals.
Until vendors are willing to admit that feature velocity is no longer a reliable proxy for value, we will continue to see this cycle: bloated products, disengaged users, and churn disguised as “market volatility.”
That’s not innovation. That’s inertia.
Innovation isn’t slapping AI on an existing tool because the category leader did. Innovation is solving the nasty, costly problems your customers complain about in Slack channels and support tickets. The ones they mention with a sigh in quarterly business reviews. The ones that never make it into the shiny roadmap deck because they’re too messy to pitch.
This industry doesn’t have a shortage of ideas. It has a shortage of courage. Courage to say no to the internal feature factory. Courage to ship fewer things that matter more. Courage to treat customer pain points as the roadmap—not an afterthought.
The companies that break this cycle will win the downturn. Not because they have the most features, but because they have the most relevance.
And relevance isn’t built in a sprint. It’s built in the long, unglamorous work of listening, fixing, and earning trust.
If you’re a vendor leader reading this, here’s your challenge: next time you’re in a product roadmap review, ask one question—which of these features directly solves a customer’s top-three pain point? If the room goes silent, congratulations. You’ve just found your real roadmap.