Unshipping

Your product should be a curation of your greatest hits. The best work anyone on your team has done. The best ideas in the space, and the best way to execute on each of them.

Curation is hard. It means removing something you put care and time into, and giving up a ✅ on your comparison page. But it’s one of the most valuable things you can do for your product.

Not everything you ship will be gold. You ship something, learn it doesn’t work, and move on. Other times the product evolves, and older features stop meeting your customers' needs because newer ones do the job better.

Teams rarely go back and remove what doesn’t work. We incentivize new and shiny. We add to the stack and grow the number of things you can do. But customers fly through your best features and then stumble over your worst.

One frustration now is enough to make them forget how great something felt a moment ago.

What we've unshipped

At Plain we’ve unshipped a bunch of things we were really excited for when we first released them:

• Chat → 💀 → Rebuilt from scratch, properly

• Thread summaries → 💀

• Suggested tasks → 💀

• Customer-facing digests → 💀

Each of these either didn’t make sense in our product, didn’t provide enough value, or weren’t worth the maintenance.

We thought thread summaries would be incredibly valuable. Long, complicated threads would become a simple summary, with what the customer asked for, what we’d done so far, and tasks ready for the team, all front and center. In reality, they just got in the way. People wanted to read the thread. People wanted to respond. If they needed a summary, they’d ask for one.

So we killed automatic summaries. We left a way for our customers to create one manually if they need it, and got the rest out of their way. Not a single customer has asked for it back, and everyone got a simpler, cleaner product.

Cut, prune, simplify

So rather than just add and add and add, your job is as much to cut, prune, and simplify. Focus the product around its best moments. Improve or kill whatever doesn’t meet the bar.

Think like an art curator. You bring value to the whole collection by taking pieces off the wall that don’t meet the bar, don’t match the theme, or don’t belong.

When you actually do it, the surface you maintain shrinks. The team gets sharper focus. You can stay smaller and leaner, working on fewer things and doing each of them better. And you stop drowning in bug reports and feature requests for features that no longer meet what customers need.