More Features, More Problems: The Case for Brand Experience-Led Growth
In my recent roles leading experience strategy inside large organizations, one pattern has become clear: many companies default to being product-led — and, more specifically, feature-first.
To be fair, that makes sense on the surface. Products are what customers pay for. Features are what get shipped, marketed, and roadmapped. It's how teams show progress. It’s what funds the business.
But here’s the challenge: when organizations prioritize features as the primary way to deliver value, they often miss the bigger picture — the customer experience. And more importantly, they miss the opportunity to build something far more valuable: a consistent, credible, and differentiating Brand Experience (BX).
That’s become my passion and focus: helping organizations shift from feature-first to Brand Experience-led thinking. Because in today’s crowded, competitive, high-expectation world, how something feels matters more than just what it does.
When Product-Led Becomes Feature-First — And Value Gets Diluted
Product-led is not inherently bad. But left unchecked, it becomes feature-first:
“If we just add one more feature, we’ll increase value.”
This mindset creates complexity, cost, and confusion — both for your teams and your customers.
Here are three reasons why feature-first thinking is actually limiting your brand’s value:
1. Customers Don’t Care About Features the Way You Do
Product teams live and breathe features. Customers don’t.
Customers are trying to get things done, solve a problem, or meet a need. When features pile up without clear benefit or emotional relevance, they become noise.
Most feature development adds incremental value at best. But the real value comes when customers say:
“This feels easy.”
“This feels like them.”
“This is exactly what I needed — even if I didn’t know I needed it.”
That’s Brand Experience doing its job.
2. Everyone Is Doing Features — It’s a Race to Sameness
In nearly every category, companies try to out-feature each other. But when everyone is launching the same “differentiators,” guess what happens?
They all start to sound the same.
Features blur. Language overlaps. Customers can't tell the difference.
Instead of standing out, you drift toward functional parity.
BX breaks that pattern. It allows your brand to show up emotionally, not just functionally. It’s what makes a moment memorable, a recommendation happen, a customer stay loyal.
3. Features Multiply Complexity (and Cost)
Every new feature adds pressure:
More decisions for the customer to make
More documentation and training for staff
More chance for misalignment across teams
More opportunity for the brand to feel fragmented
The more you build, the more you have to integrate — across systems, messaging, service channels, and behaviors.
BX-led thinking helps teams simplify the journey, not clutter it. It prioritizes seamlessness, clarity, and coherence — the very things that build customer confidence and trust.
What It Means to Be Brand Experience-Led
Being Brand Experience-led isn’t about rejecting features — it’s about contextualizing them. It’s about aligning your decisions to the emotional, behavioral, and experiential standards your brand has promised.
BX is the discipline of ensuring:
Consistency across digital and physical touchpoints
Clarity in how the brand shows up — visually, verbally, behaviorally
Credibility in delivering what the brand stands for, not just what it sells
When your features deliver a consistent Brand Experience, they don’t just function — they mean something.
Why BX Adds More Value Than Features Alone
Brand Experience-led organizations deliver:
✅ Greater customer trust
✅ More meaningful differentiation
✅ Lower long-term service friction
✅ Stronger customer loyalty
Because features can be copied.But Brand Experience is how customers remember you. It’s how they feel when they interact with you. It’s the signal that builds belief.
Final Thought
Being product-led can grow your offering. Being brand experience-led can grow your impact.
And in a world where everyone’s adding features, the real value lies in what only you can deliver:
A brand experience that’s unmistakably, confidently, consistently you.
