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.

I agree with the sentiment here but if you are building anything that relates to finance for the love of god please have a page that's just a list of PDFs of every document that is considered formal communication from the institution. It should have the name of the document, the date it was "sent", and a download link. It should be append only, persistent, and be sorted from most recent to oldest. Like for every party involved we ought to have that.

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.

It’s hard decision, but it has to be made.

I’m not building space elevator.

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.

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

Building the right thing > building/not building anything

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.

[flagged]

[flagged]