Why Fast Feature Shipping Is Slowly Killing Your Product
How Linear turned a radical bet that polishing beats the feature factory into a billion-dollar+ advantage
That shiny new feature your product team burned through their weekend to finish for the go-to-market rush?
I hate to break it to you, but it's already dead on arrival.
But don't blame your team.
Blame the lie we've all been telling ourselves about how to build great software.
The Craftsperson’s Arc
Think of a woodworker at their lathe.
They don't carve a piece of wood for two minutes and call it a masterpiece. The first shape is always rough, unbalanced, imperfect. The magic happens in stopping, looking, trying something else. Only through patient reshaping and careful refinement, and being willing to rework the same piece repeatedly does it become something truly valuable.
Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group founder and author of "TRANSFORMED," captures this beautifully, noting that even the best product teams accept that the first version of any feature is going to fall far short. It's a harsh, but simple reality.
If the product manager has instrumented their feature, is talking to users, and paying close attention, they quickly come to realize that no feature survives its first contact with real end-users.
First Time’s The Charm
Yet most organizations are convinced the first version of every feature will be perfect, and operate more like mass-market furniture factories, not wood-crafting studios.
Ship it, check the box, move to the next piece.
Inevitably, this kind of approach results in products hobbled by a mass of wobbly, half-formed features that nobody actually wants to use.
Linear, by contrast, has chosen a different path entirely.
Linear’s Craftful Revolution
Linear is the breakout work management superstar that's been quietly revolutionizing how teams think about software development at a fundamental level.
They've built a radical approach into their operating rhythm, something they call "Polishing Season." During these dedicated periods, they stop all new feature development and focus exclusively on refining what already exists.
Traditional Enterprise product leaders would call this crazy.
“Stop building new things to make things we’ve already shipped better???”
But Linear understands something most organizations miss.
That there’s a huge difference between shipping features and shipping value.
Ship At All Costs
IT leadership executives are traditionally obsessed with delivery velocity and resource utilization.
They would absolutely lose their minds even thinking about this approach and the potential damage to their incentive structures. Yet these same leaders are perfectly fine with half-baked requirements getting tossed over the wall from "The Business."
They’re so far from both the teams trying to build as well as end users that they don’t think twice about forcing their teams to build “check-the-box” features, push them out fast, and sprint to the next ticket.
Efficiency metrics satisfied, bonus earned, mission accomplished.
The Efficiency Paradox
But here’s the kicker.
This obsession with "efficiency" ends up creating the most inefficient outcomes possible.
A product graveyard littered with half-formed features that do nothing for customers or the business, accomplishing little besides bloating their product’s usability and codebase.
Turning Tables
It's like a restaurant kitchen stuck prioritizing speed over taste.
Sure, you could get more dishes out and turn tables faster by rushing, microwaving, and undercooking everything. But the damage done to your restaurant’s credibility would be complete and total. Your most loyal customers would never come back.
Worshipping at the altar of “efficiency” ends up becoming a trap that destroys the very value it was meant to accelerate.
Everyone Loses
In this broken system, while IT is rewarded for winning its quarterly metrics game, literally everyone else, including customers, sales, and support teams, down to actual users, ends up drowning in a useless mess of a product that’s increasingly impossible to either use or maintain.
This wildly misconceived incentive structure rewards the wrong behavior in the wrong ways.
Product leader John Cutler identified exactly where this system breaks down.
The Missing Fourth Column
For Cutler, the heart of this problem lies in his famous addition to the traditional Kanban board.
Most teams track "To Do," "Doing," and "Done." But for Cutler, there’s a crucial fourth column that changes everything: "Achieved Outcome."
That fourth column makes clear the fundamental gap between mere “shipping” and achieving something of value. This is the space where real value is created or destroyed.
Too many delivery organizations live in denial about this gap, pretending that "Done" means value has been achieved.
A Different Set of Metrics
Linear lives in that fourth column, seeing no feature anywhere in its product as too good for continuous polishing and improvement.
Instead of celebrating delivery velocity, Linear celebrates user retention.
Instead of rewarding feature counts delivered, Linear rewards user feature adoption.
The Competitive Reality Check
While most tech leaders micromanage ever-faster feature delivery, companies like Linear are slowing down to make their existing features irresistibly better.
Competing on feature count is a losing game. The only way to win is by competing on feature quality, integrity, delight, and addiction.
It’s a bit like the difference between a Swiss watchmaker and a robotic digital watch factory.
The factory may produce thousands more units of cheap, low-value knock-offs in an hour than the watchmaker can all year.
But only the craftsmanlike Swiss watchmaker can produce exponentially more value per unit. When customers have infinite choice between numerous alternatives, there can only be one low-cost provider. Every other company has to figure out how to differentiate by shipping unique value to its users.
With its current $1.25 billion valuation, Linear is proving that “polishing seasons” aren't just nice-to-have luxuries, but crucial necessities for delivering unique, competitive value to its users.
Coming late to the party here: this was a great read. Really appreciated the point regarding the “outcome”
column after “Done”. This creates a practical link to the more abstract principle of “outcomes over outputs” as championed by Mr. Cagan himself (svpg.com). Nice! Thank you Mike!
That was an excellent read. Thank you for the emphasis on delivering value. The added column « Achieved Outcome » is a great idea. For my own learning benefit : How would one use it typically? Move the « Done » ticket to that fourth column and update the ticket with the achieved outcome (eg. NPS increase by 10% in one month)?