One of the easiest ways to make something worse is to keep trying to make it better.
It sounds backwards, but I think it happens more often than we’d like to admit.
Imagine walking into a restaurant. The menu has burgers, sushi, pizza, ramen, tacos, steak, seafood, breakfast, desserts, and bubble tea. Maybe some of it is good, but you’d probably be surprised if any of it was exceptional.
Now imagine another restaurant with six dishes. The menu is smaller, but it feels different. You get the sense that someone made a decision. They knew what they wanted the restaurant to be and, just as importantly, what they didn’t want it to be.
I think most things we use work the same way.
A chair gets another adjustment. A camera gets another mode. An app gets another menu. Every addition can be justified on its own. The hard part isn’t deciding whether something is useful. The hard part is deciding whether it belongs.
Software makes this especially easy because adding something doesn’t require finding more physical space. A new feature can hide inside another menu, but it still changes the product.
I think that’s where a lot of products slowly lose their identity.
Over time, the goal quietly changes. Instead of making the best product for a certain kind of person, the goal becomes making sure nobody feels left out. You keep saying yes. One addition becomes five. Five becomes fifty. Eventually the product is trying to be everything at once.
At some point, you’re no longer making decisions because they’re right for the product. You’re making them because someone else already has them.
That’s a race I don’t think anyone really wins.
There will always be someone with a bigger team, more money, and more time to add things. If your strategy is simply to catch up, you’ll spend your whole life catching up.
I think every product needs a philosophy. Not because philosophies sound nice on an About page, but because they make decisions easier.
When someone suggests an addition, the first question shouldn’t be, “Would someone want this?”
The answer is almost always yes.
The better question is, “Does this move us closer to the thing we’re trying to make?”
Sometimes the answer is no. Not because the idea is bad, but because it belongs in a different product.
I’ve started believing that the best tools have an opinion. They aren’t trying to win every comparison chart or satisfy every possible customer. They’re made for a certain way of working, and it’s okay if that isn’t for everyone.
That doesn’t mean ignoring feedback. It means having a reason for the decisions you make.
I think that’s becoming increasingly rare. Maybe that’s also why so many products end up feeling the same. Everyone watches everyone else. Ideas spread from one product to another until they’re all solving the same problems in roughly the same way.
If your only goal is to make what everyone else already has, eventually the only question left is who has the biggest marketing budget.
I’d rather make something with an opinion.
Some people won’t like it, and that’s okay. The people who do might end up loving it.