Every product I've shipped taught me to delete more

Looking back at every product I've shipped, the arc of quality was never "added the right feature." It was "finally deleted the wrong ones."

My first instinct with any product is addition: a problem appears, I build a feature. Users ask for something, I build it. Six months later the product is a museum of everything I've ever been asked for, and the core — the actual reason anyone shows up — is buried under tabs.

The deletions that improved my products

• a settings page nobody changed, which really meant my defaults were the product
• a "social" feature with three users, all of whom were me testing
• export formats I'd never seen downloaded — one format, honestly supported, beat four half-kept
• an onboarding flow with seven steps, where users who finished were worse off than those who skipped

The discipline I use now

Every quarter I list features by real usage — not my hopes, logs. The bottom gets a hearing: justify your existence or lose it. Deletion is scary because features are sunk costs wearing UI. But every removal makes the product faster, clearer, and more honest about what it is.

The products I admire most are small. That's not minimalism as aesthetics. It's minimalism as respect for the user's attention.