The art of product restraint: Why less delivers more

Ever feel like your favorite app has turned into a digital junk drawer? What started as a clean and simple tool now feels cluttered and overwhelming, like a room in desperate need of Tidying Up. When decluttering homes, Marie Kondo asked us if items “sparked joy?” and I think it’s time to bring that discipline to the products we build. 

The best apps often excel at a few things rather than trying to do everything; however, too many products evolve from elegant solutions to bloated platforms. Features pile on like a hoarder collecting old newspapers, and these additions, intending to add value, often achieve the opposite - frustrating users by making it harder to find what they actually need, and adding on costs.

This doesn’t happen by chance. It stems from a growing trend in businesses that are obsessed with more options, competitive pressure for feature parity, and a lack of restraint. Instead of solving fundamental problems in ways that build value for our businesses, teams often chase solutions that dilute a product’s focus and weaken its core value. This kind of creep adds costs to our businesses in the form of additional maintenance, inefficiency, and declining quality – not dissimilar to cluttered homes over time. However, there are valuable lessons to be learned from psychology, cultivation, and other industries that can help product teams build lasting and successful products. Restraint isn’t a compromise, it’s the key to creating the right products that delight users and build value for our organizations.

Less variety, greater satisfaction

During the Pandemic, we witnessed the acceleration of a natural experiment in restraint that started in the middle of last decade. Many national restaurant chains, famous for their encyclopedic menus, streamlined their offerings. According to Toast's 2022 industry survey, 31% of restaurants reduced their menus in response to inflation. And Chili's, having reduced its menu and shifting its strategy to be more focused, has seen their public stock soar.

Coincidentally, in addition to increasing efficiency by limiting menu options, food quality increases, training is easier, and food is more efficient to produce. But most importantly, a study published in the Journal of Culinary Science and Technology found that menu choice had a direct result on customer satisfaction. Excessive options resulted in confusion, reducing diners' confidence in their selections, ultimately hurting satisfaction; while conversely, too few choices left customers feeling constrained.

Just as diners struggle with pages-long menus, we can expect users will also struggle when grappling with feature-bloated products that add to their cognitive load.

The paradox of choice

Psychologist Barry Schwartz captures this tension in his research on the Paradox of Choice. In his TED Talk discussing his book, Schwartz articulates that "whenever you're choosing one thing, you're choosing not to do other things." His research reveals that some options are good; too much becomes paralyzing. He sums up his research simply by stating: "More choice allows us to do better, but we feel worse."

In product development, we often think we're doing users a favor when we add additional features, flows, and options. Every product meeting becomes an exercise of addition, justified with phrases like "market demand" or "competitive parity."

The problem isn't that individual features are bad. In isolation, most make sense. But products with too many features often find that their core differentiator becomes muddied. Features go unused, become deprioritized but rarely decommissioned, until they atrophy into a graveyard. We keep them around because some users are utilizing these, but the vast majority might ignore them. Typically, I have found that this is often a sign that strategy is valuing horizontal expansion without understanding the vertical integration of features that reinforce and improve one another.

The art of intentional curation

A popular approach that's been gaining traction more and more is Minimalism. In her Netflix show, Tidying Up, Marie Kondo's approach to decluttering offers an insight I think product managers and product teams should take to heart: intentionally choosing what to keep is more powerful than mindlessly adding more. When she asks, "Does this spark joy?" she's really asking, "Does this serve a purpose?" In product, we'd ask if this solves a real problem.

Just as Kondo's clients justify keeping items because they might need them someday, product teams fall into the same trap with adding features that "users want" or a stakeholder had a great idea that we don't push back on, saying "a leader wanted this, so we have to deliver it."

While many features have great intentions, we often underestimate the hidden costs in maintaining and operating these features, resulting in a slow erosion of capabilities when strategies pivot. Features and teams become deprioritized, and companies often find that they spent more money deploying something that didn't yield real mutual value for users and the business.

What Kondo offers is a disciplined art of curation – rooted in a virtue of restraint – that can help focus teams more. Just like an expanded menu requires more ingredients, more chance of spoilage waste, more overhead to be able to cook all those options, a product is under similar risks when it commits to feature bloat. Refusal to get rid of features or pare down our backlog results in decreased quality overtime, and risks increasing costs maintaining less popular features.

From curation to action: Enforcing restraint in teams

The principles of intentional curation must translate into practical action. Managing stakeholder pressure when they present new ideas is often one of the biggest challenges I see across product teams. It's not that stakeholders expect every idea to make it into production, but rather the product teams assume a stakeholder's request is a certain demand that cannot be questioned or clarified. Great stakeholders and leaders often are hiring individuals to question them and push back. They don’t expect every request to be delivered on, but at least explored.

There are effective ways to combat challenges presented by stakeholder requests or the myriad of user feedback we receive that demand new features be built. We can frame internal discussions by asking the right questions to the data and requests we get. 

A few key questions I've found helpful for product teams are:

• How does this feature advance our product's vision of the world we want to create for customers?
• What existing capabilities could we deepen instead of adding something new for customers?
• Are we solving a fundamental user need, or are we just reacting to market noise?

The evidence is clear across industries: from restaurants discovering that smaller menus increase satisfaction, to Schwartz's research showing how excessive choice paralyzes us, to Kondo's insights about intentional curation. This isn't about saying no to everything - it's about being intentional with what we say yes to. Restraint isn't just a nice-to-have – great products are the result of intentional restraint and thoughtful curation. 

They stand the test of time when they are built with purposeful and restrained intention, where ideas are pruned by stating, "this is a good idea, but not for right now" or "not aligned with the vision of our product." Think about the hidden costs that arise from feature bloat - the maintenance burden, the operational complexity, the slow erosion of quality. Now consider how different things could be when we embrace restraint. The best products are not loved for the quantity of their features, but for the clarity of their vision carried out gracefully through features that reinforce and strengthen their core purpose.