It's not just "product owners." When you're one of 100 teams in BigCorp, your team might own Feature X, and another team owns Feature Y. If teams with more "successful" features grow faster, get more funding, get more compute time, get bigger, fatter org charts, then your whole team is incentivized to fight to make Feature X more prominent and elbow out Feature Y.
As an end user, when you start your device or application or web page, know that the features that are exposed in the first screen, and "above the fold" as they say, that premium placement was likely fought bitterly over, through epic corporate political battles and backstabbing. They're not there because research showed that users want them conveniently located.
> I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.” “That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the notification area that conveys no useful information but merely adds to the clutter, or (my favorite) like adding an extra item to the desktop context menu that takes several seconds to initialize and gives the user the ability to change some obscure feature of their video card.
> The thing is, all of these bad features were probably justified by some manager somewhere because it’s the only way their feature would get noticed. They have to justify their salary by pushing all these stupid ideas in the user’s faces. “Hey, look at me! I’m so cool!” After all, when the boss asks, “So, what did you accomplish in the past six months,” a manager can’t say, “Um, a bunch of stuff you can’t see. It just works better.” They have to say, “Oh, check out this feature, and that icon, and this dialog box.” Even if it’s a stupid feature.
This bullshit has been with us since there have been desktop computers with notification areas.
