Your customers can switch to a different application if they don’t like yours anymore. You can’t. Your customers don’t know how hard it is to support a feature. You do. Your customers don’t know how popular a feature really is. You probably have a pretty good idea. Your customers likely don’t even really know what features they want, even if they tell you that they do. It’s your job to figure out how to grow – or shrink – your application properly and responsibly. It’s your job to make the hard decisions and cut the features that did not work out.
— from Removing Features by Lukas Mathis
I agree with Lukas’ article, I just want to add one point, because I think it’s important within that discussion. I think that there’s one possible drawback: the developer could just ‘think’ that it’s right to remove a feature, without any evidence. It could happen.
This kind of decision must be based on data, as Lukas adds a few paragraphs above.
Sure, sometimes a decision could also be for personal reasons: “maintaining that feature was stripping me away the desire to work on that app”. Sometimes.
But it should never, ever be based on “intuition”.
It’s a process that requires one thing: humility.