I agree with all of the above. It is almost the shadow case for Rails or your web framework of choice: the last 2+ years of development of my website has been starting with a 300 line core and then just bolting stuff on. (And when I say "stuff", I mean everything from my own automated bookkeeping system to A/B testing to the web version of my product.)
Thomas has teams of smart people he can deploy to have quarterly objectives, but I don't, so I generally look to Things I Can Get Done In A Weekend, which typically means little 300 to 500 line featurelets. Somewhat surprisingly, that actually works.
(Incidentally, while adding new features to the product often takes significant amount of time to test, little marketing featurelettes are often self-contained and more or less consequence-free. The Q/A cycle on them is pretty much "Re-run existing tests and observe they don't break." followed by "Deploy to production.")
Like Thomas says, most of this stuff will not obviously be on the roadmap when you start out. Often, you'll discover in the course of reviewing usage of Featurelette 17 that there is an opportunity for improvement or (cringes) synergy, so you just schedule Featurelette 18 to bolt on a little more.
I could tell you a dozen stories that fit that pattern. "Hey, I bet it would help to have a web app. Hey, why doesn't my web app have dedicated landing pages? Hey, I could reuse content from the CMS to populate those landing pages."
It turned out the content we were generating for search marketing: very valuable in the product as well. Wouldn't have thought about it, except that we had the content staring us in the face. You have to start doing stuff to get the better ideas.
Thomas has teams of smart people he can deploy to have quarterly objectives, but I don't, so I generally look to Things I Can Get Done In A Weekend, which typically means little 300 to 500 line featurelets. Somewhat surprisingly, that actually works.
(Incidentally, while adding new features to the product often takes significant amount of time to test, little marketing featurelettes are often self-contained and more or less consequence-free. The Q/A cycle on them is pretty much "Re-run existing tests and observe they don't break." followed by "Deploy to production.")
Like Thomas says, most of this stuff will not obviously be on the roadmap when you start out. Often, you'll discover in the course of reviewing usage of Featurelette 17 that there is an opportunity for improvement or (cringes) synergy, so you just schedule Featurelette 18 to bolt on a little more.
I could tell you a dozen stories that fit that pattern. "Hey, I bet it would help to have a web app. Hey, why doesn't my web app have dedicated landing pages? Hey, I could reuse content from the CMS to populate those landing pages."