#11 The price of a feature

When building a physical product, you’re limited by its design, material, weight. You can’t keep adding things indefinitely. These limits keep you in check. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case when building software.

The more you talk to people about the thing you’re building, the more ideas you will have. And if you say yes to all of them, you’re in trouble.

You need to understand: more is not better. More is worse. More choice is more complexity. More features make it harder for people to use your product and harder for you to maintain it. More features clutter the UI. More features require more documentation and maybe even user training.

Shipping just enough is an art. It takes guts to say ‘no’. To understand what you’re not doing requires you to understand what you are doing, what problem you’re solving. And often we don’t. And so we keep adding making our apps more and more complex and harder to use.

What problem is your app solving? What is it not doing? What will you say ‘no’ to next?

Photo by Ashim D’Silva on Unsplash