I don't believe contracting of any type us needed for a feature factory. It is more when product and project managers hijack the roadmap (or even create a roadmap at all) and then March along adding things for the sake of delivering story points, and the "it was _my_ team and _my_ vision that built this", rather than building on others work.
I think a good D&D analogy is your group needs a fighter. Instead of leveling up your decent level 6 fighter to level 7,8 and 9, instead you start multi classing, picking up some droid abilities cause, hey, surely it's cool
I believe you had the luck of never taking part on the extremely demoralizing exercise that is somebody deciding on the next steps for the software, writing it down and passing alone to somebody that will manage the development of that written thing; at the same side, some developers come, get the written down, non-negotiable decisions, and make their best on creating that stuff, fully aware that their continuing employment depends on satisfying the letter of those acceptance conditions, and the salary amount must be justified every time by delivering that in a market-competitive time.
In a feature factory, the developers do not get to know if there is a roadmap or not. It's not of their concern, and the competitive nature of the bids ensures that they won't have time to think about it anyway.
I don't think that this arrangement is even possible for hired developers.
I think a good D&D analogy is your group needs a fighter. Instead of leveling up your decent level 6 fighter to level 7,8 and 9, instead you start multi classing, picking up some droid abilities cause, hey, surely it's cool
Regardless, here is something that describes feature factory in more detail: https://www.productplan.com/glossary/feature-factory/
A huge part of feature factory, worth mentioning, is any lack of checking (let alone measuring), did we build the right thing?