When you're building a product, adding features feels like progress.
New dashboard.
Better search.
More filters.
Notifications.
AI integration.
Analytics.
Every new feature makes the product look more complete.
But at some point, I realized I was asking the wrong question.
Instead of:
“What feature should I build next?”
I started asking:
“What is stopping someone from completing what they came here to do?”
Those two questions lead to very different products.
Developers naturally see missing features
When you spend hours looking at your own application, it's easy to notice everything it doesn't have.
Competitor A has advanced filters.
Competitor B has a better dashboard.
Competitor C has AI recommendations.
Suddenly, your backlog contains 40 things.
The problem is that users don't experience your product as a feature checklist.
They arrive because they want something.
For a project management tool, they want to organize work.
For an e-commerce platform, they want to sell something.
For a freelance platform, they want to find someone who can solve a problem.
Everything between the user and that outcome is friction.
A feature can actually create more friction
This sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly easy to forget.
Imagine a search page with 15 filters.
From a development perspective, that's powerful.
Users can filter by:
location
experience
price
rating
availability
language
technology
category
delivery time
More control should mean better search.
But now imagine someone who doesn't know exactly what they need.
They don't know whether their project requires React, Next.js, Vue, or something else.
You've given them more functionality while making their decision harder.
Sometimes the better interface isn't another filter.
It's a text box asking:
“What are you trying to build?”
Complexity often hides behind flexibility
Developers love flexibility.
Give users options.
Let them customize everything.
Make every workflow configurable.
But every option creates another decision.
And every decision has a cost.
This is especially noticeable with onboarding.
You can ask users for 15 pieces of information because all of them could theoretically improve their experience.
Or you can ask for three things and let them start using the product.
The second version may technically know less about the user.
But the user actually reaches the product.
That's usually more valuable.
I've run into this problem while working on NexoRush.
A freelance marketplace can become complicated very quickly.
You can add increasingly sophisticated categories, filters, seller information, service options, search tools, dashboards, and recommendation systems.
All of those things can be useful.
But the buyer's actual goal remains surprisingly simple:
“I need someone who can solve this problem.”
That changed how I started thinking about features.
A feature isn't valuable because it exists.
It's valuable if it reduces the distance between the user and that outcome.
This also changed how I think about AI features
AI makes the feature problem even more interesting.
Right now, adding “AI-powered” functionality to a product is relatively easy.
But there's a big difference between:
adding AI
and
removing work from the user.
An AI chatbot that users don't need is still friction.
An AI system that turns:
“My Shopify store is slow and I don't know why.”
into:
“You probably need someone experienced with Shopify performance optimization, Liquid, JavaScript, and Core Web Vitals.”
actually removed work.
That's the kind of AI feature I find interesting.
The technology becomes almost invisible.
The outcome is what matters.
The boring improvements are often the important ones
Some of the most valuable changes don't make good launch announcements.
Reducing a form from eight fields to four.
Making an error message understandable.
Removing an unnecessary confirmation screen.
Improving page speed.
Changing confusing button text.
Making search results more relevant.
None of these sound as exciting as launching a major new feature.
But if 20% more users complete a workflow because of them, they're probably more valuable.
A simple test
Before building something new, I've started asking three questions:
What user problem does this solve?
What happens if I don't build it?
Can I solve the same problem by removing something instead?
The third question is surprisingly powerful.
Sometimes the best new feature is deleting an old one.
Products don't win by having the longest feature list
It's easy to look at established products and assume you need to recreate everything they have.
But mature products have accumulated features over years.
They also have users with very different requirements.
A small product doesn't necessarily need to compete on the number of things it can do.
It can compete on how quickly someone gets from:
“I have a problem.”
to:
“It's solved.”
That's a much more useful metric than the number of items in a changelog.
And lately, it's the question I try to keep coming back to:
Does this feature help the user move forward, or does it just make the product bigger?
Top comments (0)