Why Your Pizza Oven Rarely Gets Used

The Temptation of Features

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.

The Pizza Oven Problem

Imagine you splurge on a gorgeous countertop pizza oven. You’re convinced it will change your family dinners forever.

But when it arrives, you realize it doesn’t fit where you thought it would. It looks awkward shoved into a corner. The outlet is too far away. Other gadgets are in the way. Pretty soon, the oven is collecting dust.

The pizza oven itself isn’t the problem. The kitchen layout is.

That’s exactly what happens in product development. We add new features to a cluttered, confusing journey. Then when adoption lags, we blame the feature. In reality, the journey was broken before the feature even arrived.

Why We Default to Features

There’s a reason leaders and teams reach for features first:

• They feel tangible. You can point to a shipped feature in a roadmap or board deck.
• They’re easy to scope. A single feature has edges, timelines, and velocity.
• They offer quick wins. Even if adoption is low, shipping “something” feels like progress.

Journey work, on the other hand, feels murkier:

• It cuts across silos (product, design, engineering, marketing, support).
• It forces tough prioritization.
• It’s harder to measure until customers feel the difference.

So we avoid it. Until customers avoid the product.

The Hidden Cost of Ignoring the Journey

When features get bolted onto broken journeys:

• Adoption drops. Customers can’t find or use them.
• Support tickets rise. Confusion creates friction.
• Teams waste cycles. Instead of improving the experience, they patch the fallout.
• Trust erodes. Leaders wonder why shipping features doesn’t translate into outcomes.

It’s not that the features are bad — it’s that the journey never made them visible, usable, or meaningful.

Rethinking the Kitchen

So how do you avoid ending up with a dusty pizza oven in your product?

1. Start with the flow, not the feature. Map the customer journey before slotting in the new thing. Ask: where would this naturally live?
2. Highlight the moments that matter. A feature isn’t valuable if no one sees it. Invest in surfacing, onboarding, and reinforcement.
3. Be willing to rearrange. Sometimes the answer isn’t to “add” but to re-arrange existing steps, navigation, or messaging.
4. Measure the journey, not just the feature. Don’t only track usage of the feature — track whether the surrounding journey improves.

Leadership Shift: Features vs. Journeys

Strong product leaders resist the urge to only chase features. They know:

• Features create spikes.
• Journeys create growth.

If you only ask, “What feature should we add?”, you’ll ship a lot and move little.
If you ask instead, “What journey moment are we improving?”, you’ll unlock real impact.

Closing Thought

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.

Features without journeys gather dust. Journeys without features feel empty. The magic happens when the two work together.

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