As a product guy I often insist that we don’t over bake a product. I am not one of those product management folks who keeps adding features for the sake of adding features to a product. At work this causes disagreements with others often, but I honestly believe after a certain point a product should be left alone to prosper. As product grows in scale and reach, there is an sense of inevitability that sets in: you want to keep adding features or settings because even if 1% of your customer base wants it, its still hundreds of thousands or millions of people. When you use scale to justify priorities, it can really make your products suffer long term. Products get bloated with features & settings that majority of people never use. The small subset of people who do use the features & settings become very vocal when their favorite feature is retired (because remember, scale works other way too to prioritize deprecation!), and eventually the product becomes so bloated and riddled with idiocy it goes into state of stasis. It .. just exists.

My favorite examples of this? Gmail. Netflix. Google Maps. IOS settings. Most photo management softwares.

My favorite product that has not descended into a mess so far, or at least managed to delay it: Outlook.