One thing I've noticed on a lot of teams is that sales/product believes their own hype and overestimates the importance of their software in people's lives. There's this belief that customers/users are waiting impatiently for features when 99% of the time, they're just not. Yes, features
affect users, but often users don't know what features are coming, because they just don't care enough to know.
Software I use every day: Firefox, Slack, Vim, MacOS, Python, Bash, GCC, Android, StrongLifts 5x5 App, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Simple (Banking) App, VLC.
All of these (except maybe Vim?) have released some significant features in the past year. Of these features, I only knew about a few Python features that were coming before they came, and none of them were ones where I was thinking "I can't wait for this to come out! If this doesn't come out soon I'm switching languages!"
On the contrary, features take a long time after they come out for me to learn how to use them and for them to affect my decision making. In fact, my initial reactions to new features are much more likely to be a liability than to be an asset to the software company. I'm considering switching away from Simple because their expenses update doesn't really fit my needs, since as a freelancer I'm not paid on a regular schedule. And I'm definitely switching away from MacOS since their deprecations have broken some tools that are key for me. If they had taken more time, maybe someone would have noticed the problems and avoided them.
Sure, early on things are different: first-to-market advantage is real. But for most of the lifetime of a project, you aren't releasing killer features. You're releasing incremental changes that have a much higher chance of losing you users than of gaining you users (in the short run, at least). Never releasing isn't an option--death by stagnation is a thing--but releases should be done with painstaking attention to detail rather than urgency.
Software I use every day: Firefox, Slack, Vim, MacOS, Python, Bash, GCC, Android, StrongLifts 5x5 App, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Simple (Banking) App, VLC.
All of these (except maybe Vim?) have released some significant features in the past year. Of these features, I only knew about a few Python features that were coming before they came, and none of them were ones where I was thinking "I can't wait for this to come out! If this doesn't come out soon I'm switching languages!"
On the contrary, features take a long time after they come out for me to learn how to use them and for them to affect my decision making. In fact, my initial reactions to new features are much more likely to be a liability than to be an asset to the software company. I'm considering switching away from Simple because their expenses update doesn't really fit my needs, since as a freelancer I'm not paid on a regular schedule. And I'm definitely switching away from MacOS since their deprecations have broken some tools that are key for me. If they had taken more time, maybe someone would have noticed the problems and avoided them.
Sure, early on things are different: first-to-market advantage is real. But for most of the lifetime of a project, you aren't releasing killer features. You're releasing incremental changes that have a much higher chance of losing you users than of gaining you users (in the short run, at least). Never releasing isn't an option--death by stagnation is a thing--but releases should be done with painstaking attention to detail rather than urgency.