There is a quiet assumption embedded in most product roadmaps: that more capability means more value. It sounds reasonable. It rarely survives contact with actual users.
Service Focus:
In 2018, Snapchat redesigned its app with the stated intention of making it easier to use, separating friend content from publisher content, reorganising the interface, adding algorithmic sorting. The result was one of the more instructive disasters in recent product history. User sentiment among Snapchat’s core 18–34 demographic plunged by 73% following the redesign, wiping out two years of carefully built brand equity in a matter of weeks.
Daily active users fell by three million, a decline the company’s own CEO attributed directly to disruption caused by the redesign. The irony is precise: a redesign meant to reduce friction created so much of it that users simply left. The product hadn’t become less capable. It had become less comprehensible, and to a user, those feel identical.
Product Focus:
The same logic, taken further, explains what happened to Juicero, a Silicon Valley juicing machine that arrived in 2016 priced at $400, engineered with the kind of technical complexity that might suit a surgical device. It could connect to Wi-Fi. It had a proprietary supply chain. It applied four tonnes (F!) of pressing force to its juice packets. What it couldn’t survive was the discovery that consumers could squeeze those same packets by hand and get the same result.
Every feature Juicero added was, in isolation, defensible. Together, they constructed an elaborate solution to a problem that didn’t require one, and the product folded within a year.
Both cases illustrate the same behavioural pattern: users don’t evaluate features in a vacuum. They evaluate the relationship between effort and reward. When the effort of understanding or using a product rises faster than the perceived reward, they disengage, quietly, and often permanently.
Which brings us, perhaps unexpectedly, to the microwave. Most of us have made peace with the fact that we use perhaps three of its twenty functions: a time input, a start button, and occasionally the defrost setting. The rest of the panel is, for most households, decorative. If you will, a necessary (the basic product) overkill (the functionality that is rarely if ever used).
Now consider the inverse proposition: a microwave designed specifically for the price-conscious young buyer, stripped to its essentials. Only 2-3 buttons: the 30-second increment, a defrost, and a stop function. Nothing more. Lower cost, lower cognitive load, and likely higher satisfaction, because the product does exactly what the user needs and nothing that confuses them.
This isn’t a hypothetical indulgence; it is a serious design question about who the user actually is and what they actually do. And while we’re examining the microwave, there is the safety observation I’d written about in 2017, that the tray should, as a standard feature, return to its original position after each cycle, irrespective of the duration. So that a heated cup doesn’t end its rotation with the handle facing inward, forcing the user to grip a scalding surface to reach the handle. The feature exists on select high-end models.
That it isn’t standard tells you something about the gap between what product teams prioritize and what users actually encounter at the moment of use.
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These are the kinds of questions I explore with product leaders and co-founders in my virtual strategy sessions. If any of this has struck a chord, I’d be glad to hear about what you’re working on. [https://www.productinnovator.in/consult]