Part One: Strategy · Where demand comes from
Features are what a team builds, so features are what it thinks in. People think about where they are trying to get, and judge the product by whether they got there.
A team can spend a year on a reporting module and describe it perfectly: filters, exports, scheduled emails. The operations manager who asked for it wanted to stop being surprised in the Monday meeting. If she is still surprised, the module failed, however complete it is.
Features are visible, countable and shippable. Progress in somebody else's life is none of those. So plans fill with nouns, and the question "what will this let someone do that they could not do before?" goes unasked.
The progress is rarely only practical. An architect is choosing a tool for the drawings she shows to clients. She wants the drawings done by Thursday. She also wants to walk into the meeting without dread, and to be the partner whose clients say yes. And she wants to get better at the work: drawings that let a client see the building before it exists. A product can deliver the first and fail the rest, and she will say it "didn't really help" without being able to say why.
Kathy Sierra makes the point with cameras. Nobody wants to be good at a camera. They want to take photographs they are proud of. A camera maker that teaches people about light and composition is serving that. One that adds a ninth shooting mode is serving the camera.
The measure of a product is what a person can now do, and who they get to be, that was out of reach before. That is harder to put in a plan than a feature. It is also the only score the customer is keeping.
Therefore:
Describe what you are building as a change in someone's situation: what they can do, how they feel and how they look to others afterward. Judge every feature by whether it moves a real person toward that.
In practice. Take the next item on the plan and finish this sentence for it: "After this, a customer can finally..." If the sentence ends with the name of the feature, you do not yet know why you are building it.
Goes with. Progress starts from THE STRUGGLING MOMENT (1). It usually runs past the edges of the software, which is THE WHOLE JOB (7). Show it back to people as PROGRESS THEY CAN SEE (43).
The camera example is from Kathy Sierra, Badass: Making Users Awesome (2015).