The build trap — start unbuilding

Build it and they will come. Build it and more will come. Keep building and surely your success will be guaranteed!?

Build it and they will come. Build it and more will come. Keep building and surely your success will be guaranteed!?

– Inspired by my recent reading of Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri.

The success of any product is predicated on value. The customer gives you something of value in return for solving a problem or filling a void. If there is no value, there is no value exchange. Value doesn't equal features or flare.

The poet and author de Saint-Exupéry, in the English translation of his book 'Wind, Sand and Stars' said,

"In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."

In this quote, he's talking about the many generations of craftsmanship that went into perfecting the chair, a ship's keel, or the aerodynamic sha tpe of a plane's fuselage.

In product, the dominant idea that everything we build should stay and that to provide value, we must build more is toxic and counter to our success. I rarely see companies removing features, but it should become a more common practice, and I challenge you to think about what features you can remove to simplify your product.

Twitter tried fleets, and it didn't go as well as I'm sure they hoped. So, they removed it (not everyone was happy about this). That's a pretty drastic example, and a company with a mature product development process shouldn't have released such a prominent feature so publicly without doing much more market testing in the first place. They're just like any other company and sometimes bet on the wrong ideas, but in the end, they did the right thing and removed it. 

So, what feature are you going to remove from your product? Despite its never-ending popularity, is it time to remove the preverbal headphone jack from your software? Is something slowing down your ability to iterate and preventing you from achieving your proper form?