Why we remove more features than we add

I spent years adding new features to Concord, until I finally realized our most valuable contribution would be taking them away.

From the beginning, one of our core principles was to build for simplicity, not complexity. But somewhere along the road, we lost our way.

When we took a deep dive into how customers actually used Concord, though, we discovered a humbling truth: Most of our users only engaged with 20 percent of our features.

The other 80 percent wasn’t just going unused. It was actively confusing people.

So I made a tough call that horrified my sales team: I told the developers to start removing features.

Not just hiding them in a menu somewhere, but actually removing capabilities we’d spent months building.

How do you think our customers reacted?

They thanked us.

Here’s what we learned from this experience:

• Every feature comes with hidden costs. Every new capability you build created more access points, more potential bugs, more maintenance burden, and more cognitive load for users. That “simple addition” you think will take “just 10 lines of code” will haunt you for years as technical debt.
  
• Most product bloat comes from trying to make everyone happy. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, “You can’t please all the people all the time.” It’s impossible! So don’t build enterprise features for customers who want simplicity… or simple features for customers who want enterprise-scale power. Nobody will be happy.
  
• Support costs compound when you’re not vigilant. It takes a huge amount of time and labor to support features that only bring value to a tiny percentage of your user base. You could invest that time and labor improving your core functionality, and delighting many more users every day.

The hardest part wasn’t pinpointing which features to cut. It was overcoming the sunk cost fallacy. When your whole team has put in months of work to develop a feature, removing it can feel like a failure.

But it’s not. It’s a concession to reality.

Has your product accumulated features that most customers never use? What would happen if you had the courage to remove them?

Matt Lhoumeau is the CEO and co-founder of Concord, a leading provider of Agreement Intelligence solutions. Concord empowers growing businesses to make smarter operational decisions by unlocking actionable insights from contracts, and is trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide.