Product teams love features. They feel concrete, measurable, and fast. A stakeholder can say, “We just need a referral program. Add a dashboard. Add AI.” and everyone nods. Features are exciting because they promise progress. But progress without context rarely sticks.
What gets overlooked is the journey — the messy, less glamorous work of making sure users can actually find, understand, and benefit from those shiny new features.
Think of it this way: a premium countertop pizza oven arrives at your home. Beautiful design, excellent reviews, genuine capability. But your kitchen counter is full. The outlet is behind the microwave. The dough recipe requires a scale you don’t own. The oven sits on the counter for a week, gets moved to the garage, and never gets used. The product was great. The environment was incompatible.
Features without journeys gather dust. Journeys without features feel empty. The magic happens when the two work together.
Features added to cluttered or confusing user experiences follow the same pattern. Leaders favor features because they’re tangible, easy to scope, and generate apparent momentum. Journey optimization feels ambiguous by contrast — it spans departments, demands difficult choices, and shows results gradually.
Neglecting journey work creates cascading issues: adoption suffers, support burdens increase, teams expend resources managing consequences rather than enhancing experiences, and stakeholder confidence diminishes when shipped features don’t produce expected outcomes.
The shift is to map customer flows before introducing new features. Emphasize critical moments. Restructure existing elements when necessary. Evaluate overall journey improvement rather than isolated feature metrics. Features create spikes. Journeys create growth.
Every product team has its pizza oven story — a feature that sounded great but never got used. The problem wasn’t the oven. It was the kitchen.
Ian Alexander
VP of Design — writing on leadership, AI product strategy, and building teams that ship.