Sometimes “wasteful” is the fastest way to learn what actually matters.
The following is inspired by Kent Beck's eassay "Inefficient Efficiency"
I know a product manager—let’s call him Marcus—who learned Kent Beck’s “inefficient efficiency” lesson the hard way during a major feature launch.
His team was tasked with building a comprehensive user dashboard: analytics, notifications, settings, profile management—the works. The engineering instinct was to build it all up front. Architect the full backend. Define every data model. Reuse everything. Brew the whole pot.
Marcus pushed back.
“What if we just shipped the analytics view first? Like, just that. Users can see their basic metrics and nothing else.”
The team resisted. “That’s inefficient,” they said. “We’ll have to rewrite it all later. It’s not scalable.”
But Marcus held firm.
Two weeks later, they shipped a bare-bones analytics view. A few charts. Basic filtering. No bells and whistles. It felt incomplete—even embarrassing.
Then came the feedback.
💥 Users didn’t care about most of the analytics.
💥 The filtering was confusing.
💥 The real value? Notifications.
If they had followed the “efficient” path, they would’ve spent months building the wrong thing beautifully. Instead, they got a reality check in two weeks.
They pivoted. Focused on notifications. Ended up keeping most of the “throwaway” code. And in six weeks, shipped something users actually wanted.
The lesson:
Efficiency isn’t about minimizing effort. It’s about minimizing the time between building something and learning whether it’s right.
Sometimes the fastest path forward feels slow. But it’s the only one that works.
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