It happens quietly at first. An app you once loved starts to feel different. A little heavier. A little less magical. You can’t pinpoint the exact moment it changed, but you know the feeling is gone.
This isn’t a rare phenomenon; it happens all the time. The magic of a product is often lost in the relentless pursuit of more. More features, more customization, more possibilities.

This is the phenomenon of "feature bloat," where the relentless pursuit of more makes a product slow, confusing, and ultimately, less useful. Users want quick solutions to their problems, yet bloat forces them to navigate a maze.

Looking back, the original promise of the iPhone ecosystem was its simplicity. When Apple opened the App Store, it started in an era of focused utility. There was an app for one purpose, and it strived to execute that purpose with elegance. This focus was its strength.

Look at your phone today. How many of your apps still honor that promise? Your banking app now sells you a phone contract. Your chat app wants you to watch stories and join communities. Your booking app tries to be your airline, your tour guide, and your restaurant critic all at once.

From a business perspective, each addition seems logical. It’s a cross-sell, an upsell, an expansion of the ecosystem. If a user is booking a trip, of course they need a rental car. If they go shopping, they need to check their balances in their banking app. The logic is there, but it misses a fundamental truth: Users care less about the number of opportunities you provide. They want a product that provides an ideal solution to their specific problem.

This makes me think of the Innovator's Dilemma. Successful companies can grow so big and focused on processes that they lose the agility that made them innovative. A smaller, faster competitor eventually emerges, and the cycle repeats.

I believe there is a Product's Dilemma that mirrors this. A product begins clean, minimalistic, and simple. It focuses on solving one problem with great efficiency. But as it grows, it becomes burdened by features that only a minority of users require. The product becomes much more complex than it used to be. Focus is traded for features, and simplicity fades for what looks like more business chances.

The business side sees this as adding value. In reality, it’s a tax on the user’s attention. By overwhelming users with options, you dilute the value of the core product, the very thing people came for in the first place.

This is where design and product must become the protectors of the user experience. Their key role is to challenge business assumptions by asking the hard questions:

• Does this feature serve the long-term vision of our product?
• What happens if we don’t build this?
• Is the benefit of this feature greater than the cost of the complexity it adds?

Protecting the product isn’t only about saying no to new ideas. It's also about having the discipline to say goodbye to old ones. Throughout my career, I've seen how difficult it is to remove a feature once it's built. Even if it failed to deliver, taking it away feels like an admission of failure. This becomes even harder since our culture doesn’t accept failure.

Psychology has a name for this: the "Sunk Cost Fallacy." It’s the feeling that you must continue with something simply because you've already spent resources on it. That’s why taking away a built feature feels like a waste. We don’t see the real costs. It still needs maintenance. It distracts from what matters and it slowly makes the product worse for users.

From now on, don't ask what a new feature will add. Ask what it will dilute. We think innovation is about addition, but often, its more about subtraction.

Or, as Dieter Rams famously stated: