Death by a Thousand Bricks

Bloat compounds.

This article by Tom Meyvis and Heeyoung Yoon summarizes the challenge anyone building products faces:

When an incoming university president requested suggestions for changes that would allow the university to better serve its students and community, only 11% of the responses involved removing an existing regulation, practice or programme. Similarly, when the authors asked study participants to make a 10 × 10 grid of green and white boxes symmetrical, participants often added green boxes to the emptier half of the grid rather than removing them from the fuller half, even when doing the latter would have been more efficient.

Adams et al. demonstrated that the reason their participants offered so few subtractive solutions is not because they didn’t recognize the value of those solutions, but because they failed to consider them.

Building Tombs

Bloat compounds. If the answer to a problem is -1 and I add 1, I’m off by a factor of two. The features we add entomb us, death by a thousand bricks, each methodically and intentionally placed, most of them adding to a problem that begged for less product, not more.

Indeed, when instructions explicitly mentioned the possibility of subtractive solutions, or when participants had more opportunity to think or practise, the likelihood of offering subtractive solutions increased.

Permission to Destroy, Please

What Product leaders need is to either get or dispense permission to break apart, remove and retire. There is mess and there is loss in this process. Edge cases are human experiences. While less is not more, often enough it’s better.

Space to Practice

The second interesting insight was providing space and affording the opportunity to practice. We are not good at taking away, and so we need time and the hours, days or weeks required for emergent decisions. Meyvis & Yoon land with this thought:

It thus seems that people are prone to apply a ‘what can we add here?’ heuristic (a default strategy to simplify and speed up decision-making). This heuristic can be overcome by exerting extra cognitive effort to consider other, less-intuitive solutions.