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How to restrain yourself in the candy store?
Hmmm, but maybe I also need this. And that. And that! It happens to all of us: you set out to buy a simple mp3 player, and you come home with something monstrous that has all the features you 'think you might need one day'. Guess what, the same thing happens to project managers in product development. You set out to make this product that fulfills an important, basic user need, and your team (and you) keep on adding new 'handy' stuff to the list. Feature creep. Or featuritis. Or Blithe. Ending up in feature fatigue on the consumer/user side.

Tips
Six Revisions has eight tips on managing feature creep. In software development, mind you, but I think that there's something to be learned from it for product developers.

Feature creep, also known as scope or requirement creep, refers to unforeseen requests for additions and changes that are outside the project scope. It typically happens due to inadequate requirements gathering, poor initial planning, and an unclear protocol for change implementation, among other things.

Doing one thing right
You could also chose to focus on the essentials. 37signals is a company that makes tightly-focused, very easy to use, powerful web-app-building software. And they were criticized for keeping it simple, according to this article in Wired.

But not everyone was convinced of Rails' revolutionary potential. Critics had been saying that Rails wasn't versatile enough.

There you go. You do one thing right, but you don't do all those other 207 things that you could do. I don't think they really mind the criticism at 37signals though, considering the 2 million account holders of Basecamp, their online collaboration software. Read the 37signals blog 'signals versus noise' by the way; very much worthwhile. The product-equivalent of the 'doing one thing right' strategy? Muji's wall-mounted cd-player by IDEO.

Do everything (and layer it)
A colleague of mine gets pissed off every time someone mentions feature creep as something that needs to be fought. "Consumers (the side of people that buys stuff) want more features as they buy the product. And you need to sell your product. To become president, you need to get elected," he says. He has a simple philosophy: put any feature in there you want, as long as it doesn't get in the way of people that don't want to use it. Or that don't know of its existence, for that matter. Interesting approach, although it does require a lot of time to design and implement all these functions; it makes your product awfully complex to develop.

See also
> Features, features everywhere

Earlier posts about feature frenzy
('frenzy' is another good synonym we can use, nice alliteration don't you think?):
> Defeating Feature Fatigue
> Office 2007: New Features, That Were Already There
> The Giant Army Knife