The most important product decision is what you don't build

andsoitis

Yes. Don't succumb to featuritis. Destroy the barnacles.

swader999

The one I get constantly is we want "custom reporting". Well what the hell is that really? Why, why, why do you need that? Then I just build a new feature they will actually use and defer "custom reporting" for another month.

SP3269

It’s hard decision, but it has to be made. I’m not building space elevator.

djtriptych

Or as I like to say “the best way to launch is to cut features”. As an engineering leader you’ve got to advocate for it against product/design all the time.

pedalpete

Part of the question may be how do you change the users expectations. If you are building a product the user already knows, that might not be difficult. We work in the sleep space, where everyone expects a hypnogram and a sleep score. Even though these things don't actually tell you anything real. They are of little value to most people, but that is the expectation.

jongjong

I would say that 'what not to build' is the second most important decision. The most important decision is what limitations and constraints you are prepared to accept. There are always limitations and constraints but they are rarely identified up-front. The most difficult, hard-to-revert decisions are those related to hard constraints imposed by the systems and/or data you have to rely on. Maybe it's not physically possible to obtain the data you need to solve the problem you need to solve for the price you need for it to be viable. Maybe you need to be able to process large files which may take many hours to complete. Or your input data grows father than you can process on a single CPU core. Or the security requirements of a particular piece of data means that you can't efficiently connect it to some external piece of data as you need.

mmonaghan

I see posts pop up with this sentiment often and I'm of two minds: - llms let us build exactly what we want fairly quickly nowadays, or at least a prototype and - being able to build these features (or separate products) quickly is exactly the trap > It’s the same test I keep applying when picking the right problems to solve — does it make the boat go faster? Who knows this though? It's rarely engineers. Product often has a good sense within their lane. Leadership usually (at good companies) is mostly aligned, with some nuance depending on who's speaking. It's a good sentiment but rarely a single person's decision. As I said, I see these pop up and I'm usually annoyed because what new take could someone bring at this point, but I read them every single time :p

jmathai

I would go one step further. Instead of 5 low impact features, build the one high impact one. Instead of a cheap notifications hub, fix the need for why you need one.

Prydown

Saved countless sprints by killing features that sounded cool but didn't solve core problems. Less code, less maintenance.

j45

Building the right thing > building/not building anything

lampcord

Been there. Wasted months building features nobody wanted, all because we didn't prune the roadmap aggressively enough.

Pxtl

I feel this in my bones. I've literally had to fix outages in products where the failure was a "document store" or a "notification system" haphazardly slapped on by a student under direct supervision of a PM with no experienced technical leadership. One time it was user profile avatars that took a site down. I work in line of business software, nobody needs avatars.

vivzkestrel

- one thing i also started doing is indirectly ask about the idea on expert subreddits on reddit and see what people have to say - one of my latest ideas was to handle spam calls on my android phone - the way i wanted to do this is to have an app pick up the phone call automatically everytime and ask a bunch of user defined questions - for example, caller: hi i am angel from XYZ spam company - audio streams through the app with an LLM processing every word and it asks back "who are you trying to reach?" - caller doesnt answer in 30 seconds or wrong answer. call dropped automatically and the phone is not even ringing yet - caller says ABC and the autoresponder immediately asks the next question - "what is the password to reach abc" - caller doesnt answer or gives incorrect answer within 30 seconds and call is dropped immediately - caller gives correct answer and now the phone starts ringing - obviously the questions are set by the user and it ll change from user to user - imagine by biggest disappointment when I found out from the r/androiddev group that the permission to actually audio process a phone call is simply not available unless you root your android phone. Its a no-go even on the iphone - Even if you do root the phone, I haven't gotten a conclusive answer from anyone either on reddit or even here on HN so far on the feasibility of implementing such a feature - Thank god I did not burn 100 hrs into this