A product team’s worst nightmare always starts innocently.
Someone in a meeting raises their hand and asks: "Could we add dark mode?"
It’s reasonable. It’s aesthetic. You write it down.
Then another person asks: "Can our exports support both CSV and Excel?"
Makes sense. Business users love spreadsheets. You add it to the backlog.
Next, a stakeholder wants custom dashboards. Then a power user demands six decimal places because, apparently, their internal accounting process was designed by 14th-century medieval mathematicians.
Before you know it, Sales walks into the room carrying enterprise feature requests like they’re delivering sacred scrolls from a mountaintop. Support forwards customer feedback. Even Engineering suggests "just one small infrastructure improvement" that alters the UI.
And that is the exact moment your beautifully designed software starts looking like your kitchen junk drawer.
You know the one. It’s got a tangled phone charger, three dead AA batteries, a couple of pens that don't work, and a mysterious, heavy black cable that nobody owns a device for anymore, but somehow survives every spring cleanup.
The Logic Trap
Lately, I have been reading through hundreds of feature requests. Here is the terrifying part: every single one of them is logical. Every single one is requested by someone genuinely using the product to solve a real problem.
And that is exactly what makes them so dangerous.
Software rarely dies from bad ideas. Bad ideas are easy to spot; they get laughed out of the room. Software dies from too many good ones.
The trap feels incredibly obvious when you watch someone else fall into it. You open a competitor's app and immediately start criticizing:
- "Why is this product so complicated?"
- "Why are there seventeen different settings pages?"
- "Why does clicking one button open another screen with eight more buttons?!"
It happens because somewhere along the way, nobody had the courage to say no. Everyone got served slightly. Nobody got served deeply.
The Power of Being Painfully Stubborn
The companies people obsess over have opinions. Strong ones. Painfully stubborn ones. They make choices, and they accept that not everyone will agree with those choices. In fact, they count on it. That’s the entire point.
Think about the products you absolutely love. They are rarely the cheapest options on the market. They are almost never the most feature-packed. Instead, they are the ones where you open them and immediately think: "Yes. This is exactly how software should work."
That feeling isn’t an accident. That’s the result of an opinion.
Right now, opinion is weirdly underrated in tech. Founders chase patents. Investors chase network effects. Builders chase velocity. Meanwhile, a few products quietly win the entire market simply because someone stubbornly stood their ground and said:
"No. We're not adding that. We don't believe software should work that way."
Opinion creates shape. Shape creates identity. Identity creates word of mouth. And word of mouth creates the kind of fierce loyalty that survives when the next shiny startup appears promising "AI-blockchain-quantum-synergy-powered productivity optimization."
The Scrambled Egg Metric
The hardest part of product management isn’t prioritization; it’s courage. Saying yes feels profitable in the short term. More features mean more potential customers, which means a theoretically bigger market.
But saying yes to everything slowly turns your product into hotel breakfast scrambled eggs. You know exactly what I mean: it is technically food. It provides calories. But absolutely nobody on earth is excited to eat it.
Personally, I would take 50,000 obsessive users over a million indifferent ones any day of the week. The obsessive users will forgive your mistakes, they will tell their friends, and they will stay. The indifferent ones will disappear the exact second a competitor appears with slightly rounder buttons.
Every single feature request is a trade. Every yes dilutes something. Every no sharpens something.
Go find the last three feature requests sitting in your inbox right now. Ask yourself: Which one contradicts what we fundamentally believe software should be?
Reject it. Sleep peacefully tonight. Your kitchen junk drawer already has enough cables.
originally posted at edgar.co.ke
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