𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗱𝗱. 𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲. Jason Fried (CEO of 37signals, creator of Basecamp) just wrote a piece about renting a brand-new smart home for his parents in Southern California. Every system was state of the art. Every system was a disaster. Light switches needed a technician-led tutorial. The dishwasher wouldn’t start without scanning a QR code and downloading an app. The thermostat buried a simple temperature setting behind layers of tiny-text menus. Then a preset schedule overrode the choice anyway. A light switch. One of the simplest inventions in history. Now requires onboarding. This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a design incentive problem. Engineers get rewarded for shipping features. Nobody gets promoted for deleting one. So features pile up. Each one makes sense in isolation. Together, they create a product that needs a manual for a task your grandparents did without thinking. Fried isn’t anti-tech. He runs a software company. He tried the smart home route a decade ago. Automated blinds. Smart irrigation. Low-voltage controls. Regretted it almost immediately. Constant glitches. Expensive technician visits. More friction, not less. His current renovation? All analog. Switches you flip. Dimmers you turn. A thermostat with a pin on a dial. Simplicity is expensive. It takes more engineering, more thought, and more courage than complexity. You have to fight the instinct to add. You have to resist the pressure to match a competitor’s feature list. You have to be willing to rebuild from the foundation when bolt-ons start creating more problems than they solve. Steve Jobs understood this. He cut the floppy drive, the headphone jack, the CD-ROM. Every removal was a fight. Every removal was right. Post-Jobs Apple is drifting from that discipline. Updates shuffle menus, layer features, and pass retraining costs directly to the customer. The real cost of complexity isn’t just angry customers. It’s quite non-adoption. Your product might have 40 capabilities. Your customer uses 4. The other 36 aren’t adding value. They’re adding confusion and support tickets. This applies to any business. Including mine. When I think about adding a system or a process to one of our properties, the question isn’t just “what does this do?” It’s “how does the person on the other end experience it?” If the answer requires a manual or a call to my team, I haven’t added value. I’ve added a maintenance ticket wearing a different outfit. Before you add the next feature, product, or service to your business, ask one question: does this make the customer’s life simpler, or just mine? If it’s just yours, you’re building a smarter dishwasher that nobody can turn on without reading a manual or watching a YouTube video. Link to Jason Fried’s article below. It’s a great read. https://lnkd.in/eq2U6iMk