When building software, you’ll often need to include "table stakes" features—basic, expected functionality that are bare minimum business requirements or which users assume will be there. Think user authentication, payment processing, search functionality, or data export capabilities. Some table stakes features aren’t industry-specific, but there are usually some features that are common (or required) for your industry but which don't differentiate your offering and may not be important to your users. A fintech product might need to include things like bank statements, annual tax reports, and strict data retention rules— things that aren’t necessarily the reason people buy or use the product, but that have to be there.
Teams often assume they can implement these sorts of ubiquitous features quickly by leveraging third-party services, off-the-shelf solutions, or simply by copying what others have already done.
The reality is that even seemingly straightforward features require time, effort, and thoughtful decision-making. Choosing the wrong approach or failing to define clear requirements can lead to significant technical debt, costly rewrites, or operational headaches down the road. Let’s take a closer look at why these table stakes features deserve more attention than they often get.
The first instinct for many teams is to look for third-party solutions that provide out-of-the-box functionality. Services like Stripe for payments, Auth0 for authentication, or Algolia for search can dramatically speed up development. Although buying can be the right decision (versus building it from scratch), the existing solutions aren’t always the the right fit for your product.
Before committing to a solution, you need to evaluate:
Skipping this research can lead to painful pivots later. For example, if you integrate an authentication provider that doesn’t support multi-factor authentication (MFA) or single sign-on (SSO) and later need to add it, migrating users to a new provider can be a nightmare.
Many third-party solutions start as a cost-effective way to accelerate development. But over time, the costs can scale significantly, and vendor lock-in can become a major problem.
At a small scale, the costs for some third-party tools might seem negligible, but as the product grows, costs can skyrocket. Migrating to another third party (or in-house solution) is often risky and complex, can be disruptive for users, and could be more costly than building from scratch the first time.
Before integrating a tool, consider:
The answer is often to initially implement a solution that you know will get expensive at scale, but plan to “earn the right” to build it yourself by demonstrating success. That can be an acceptable trade-off if you go in with eyes wide open and a plan. What you want to avoid is getting caught off guard.
Even when you choose the right third-party tool, integration is rarely as simple as just dropping in an SDK or API key. Customization is often necessary to fit your product’s specific needs. For example:
Each of these requires strategic thought, design, engineering, testing, and ongoing maintenance. It’s also important to examine the bounds of the tools you’re evaluating to understand what you can and can’t do, and the level of effort to customize beyond the basics. It’s sometimes only after committing to a solution that you realize that the reference implementation you saw during the sales process isn’t what you get out of the box – that it actually requires a tremendous amount of custom work to realize.
One of the biggest risks with table stakes features is that teams don’t clearly outline their requirements up front. Instead, stakeholders will assume the functionality they think of as “basic” is well understood, while the dev team might not understand the full scope of what’s needed. They may choose a cheaper/faster option that omits critical functionality. For example, without clear requirements, you might end up with:
Each of these issues is fixable—but at a cost. When oversights like these are discovered late, they often require rework that could have been avoided with proper planning. It’s just as important to have explicit, comprehensive requirements for table stakes features as the novel features you plan to build.
Many developers (and dev shops) will estimate a project on the explicit requirements they get—nothing more and nothing less. You may assume table stakes features were implied by your list of requirements, and they may have plugged your exact list of features into a formula that doesn’t take those assumptions into account. They come back with a reasonable estimate, or a low bid on the project, because they’ve completely ignored these table stakes features.
Sometimes that’s a legitimate oversight, but more typically developers know full well that there are unarticulated requirements that they ignored because it wasn’t what they were asked to evaluate. That happens for all sorts of reasons, but mainly because they are under pressure to say they can meet arbitrary deadlines, budgets, or to win the business in the case of an agency. They know that once the project is underway they can blame the stakeholders for the oversight (“you changed the requirements!”) and get approval for the additional time and budget they need once it’s too late to change course.
Another common misconception is that if competitors have already built a feature and customers expect it, then replicating it should be quick and straightforward. In reality, even when a feature is seen as a commodity by your customers and users, it still requires careful planning and development. For example:
Sometimes people look to big, successful companies and assume what they've done is good ("they must have done the research") and easy to copy ("do it like Uber"). Many features that appear simple and obvious to the outside observer may have taken years of refinement to get right. Learning from their success is valuable, but don't make too many assumptions.
Underestimating these factors can lead to expensive missteps and wasted effort, or half-baked implementations that frustrate users and require costly fixes later.
The bottom line is that even the most “standard” product features require strategic thinking. Rushing through decisions or assuming off-the-shelf solutions will handle everything can lead to costly mistakes. To mitigate these risks:
Table stakes features can be easy to gloss over, but they don’t come for free. The more thought you put in upfront, the smoother your product development will be—and the fewer expensive surprises you’ll face later. You may decide not to pre-optimize for scale before you’ve proven it’s truly needed, but you want to make that trade-off with eyes wide open rather than be surprised later that you picked a tool that won’t grow with you.
