The Tyranny of Yes

You’ve probably heard some version of the idea that saying “yes” is really saying “no” to many other things.

My entire career, I’ve watched great products get more and more bloated over time. You can often see it in the settings. Zoom is a perfect example. Zoom scratched a particular itch. We finally had a reliable video conferencing service that worked great every time. It did the core thing of video streaming so well that we forgave the fact that its UI overlays constantly obscured our screen sharing.

Have you looked at the settings in Zoom lately? I mean holy crap. I know books that aren’t as long as that. At some point along the way, Zoom lost what made it great. They kept adding features and complexity. Now they’re trying to push some misguided A.I. feature no one needs.

At some point, they stopped saying no. Maybe they never did.

By the way, I’m now using Whereby for all my personal meetings. It’s as solid and fast as Zoom but 1000 times simpler. Clayton Christensen would approve.

How do I…

I hate all of this for a number of reasons but selfishness is a big one. I hate that software I love gets ruined over time. I remember when iOS came out and I was happy to recommend an iPad to my computer-unsaavy parents because of the simplicity. Now, between 1000 notifications and an ever-expanding waistline of settings, iOS has become impossible to navigate for your average person. People in my life keep asking me different questions about their phones starting with the phrase “How do I…” or “Why does my phone…”

Under Pressure

So why does this happen? Why do great products keep saying yes to new features they don’t need?

I think it’s because of two kinds of perceived pressure: Market and organizational.

Market Pressure

Many years ago, my friend and I had a very successful iOS app. Initially, I was the customer service person for the app. Almost immediately, the feature requests started rolling in. Reading so many different kinds of feature requests, often with a tone of desperation made me feel a certain amount of anxiety. What if we were unable to compete? What if our app wasn’t enough for the market? I was looking at our competitors and fearing that we were falling behind.

But this was all noise. People had purchased our app because it did something special. And instead of doubling down on that, we ended up expanding it and eventually it looked like everything else. We squandered something special. We bowed to perceived market pressure.

Organizational Pressure

Too often, we equate delivering features to growth. We have a product team to feed and things that need to ship. We product leaders feel the pressure of the organization and we say yes when we should say no. Even when we find product-market fit, we think the answer to growth is more features.

But maybe instead, the answer to growth is creating something brand new. Maybe it’s a new module. Maybe it’s a whole new market. Meanwhile, we can continue making the original product faster, more responsive, more streamlined. Increase the signal. Lose the noise.

Saying No

I think the thing we need to say no to the most is continuing to run our product teams the same way. It’s been rare in my career to find product teams that pivot after finding product-market fit. It’s like that scene in Tommy Boy where he talks about killing his pet. We take something great and we ruin it. There has to be a different way.

How about you? What examples have you seen of product teams saying yes when they should have been saying no, and how to we improve? Is this even broken or is it just part of the natural cycle of product development?