Last January, I spent three weeks at a small studio in Copenhagen watching a team of eight ship a product used by forty thousand people. Their feature list was shockingly short. No dashboards-within-dashboards, no settings panels that required a manual. Just a single screen that did exactly one thing, and did it with the kind of precision that makes you forget software is supposed to be hard.
The Cost of Saying Yes
Every feature you add is a promise you have to keep. I learned this the hard way at my previous company, where we spent fourteen months building a collaboration suite that nobody had asked for. The specification document ran to two hundred pages. The result was a product so dense that our own team refused to dogfood it. We had optimized for the pitch deck, not the person using it at eleven p.m. on a Thursday.
“The best interface is the one you never notice. It does its job and steps aside — like a well-set table that lets you focus on the conversation.”