What features should you KILL? Not what feature should you add!
In our meetings, we usually keep debating about what features to add to our product. But honestly, we need to be able to say NO to that.
Building became even easier with AI, so it is tempting to add a ton of features. The cost is how complex your app becomes. This is why products get messy fast. Usually it looks fine for old users, because they learned each feature slowly while you built it. But new users open the app and feel lost.
@busmark_w_nika asked yesterday what PH is missing and what people would improve. I am sure the team has enough to cook with now. So I want to ask the opposite:
What should Product Hunt kill? What feature would the product be better without?
What did you say NO to in your own product?
What feature would you remove from a big product you use?
Replies
Crossnode
emmmm I generally say no to features that weren't explicitly requested by the paying user, but this is actually a very compelling point! Oversimplify or Overbuild :))
Mailwarm
@rania_rimali Honestly even for paying customers, sometimes we should say NO.
Mailwarm
To be honest, it’s hard because creating and testing new features is also the fun part. @bengeekly We have seen it together recently.
Recently, on Mailwarm, when we added the feature that lets users monitor spam score by email provider and adjust warmup toward one provider more than another. It was fun, it works very well, and it creates real value.
But it also reminded me of the danger: every useful feature still adds complexity.
AI makes it easier to build more, but it makes product discipline even more important.
The real question is not “can we build this?” It’s “does this make the core workflow clearer or more confusing?”
And we are happy to have our amazing Product Manager, Youness, handling that.
For Product Hunt, I’d probably simplify anything that distracts from the core value: discovering the product, understanding why it matters, asking questions, and giving useful feedback.
That’s where the magic is.
I’d kill or reduce anything that rewards shallow activity over useful discovery. Product Hunt is strongest when people are finding good products and having real conversations, not when the experience starts feeling like another engagement game.
Mailwarm
@farrukh_butt1 The problem is that we all end up playing the game of reward shadows when others use it.
the onboarding walkthrough. so many products add this guided tour thing that pops up the first time you log in and honestly nobody reads them, everyone just clicks skip. if your product needs a 12-step tutorial to make sense you have a design problem not a documentation problem. the best tools I've used just let me figure it out by doing things. also notification settings that default to everything turned on... that's not a feature that's spam with permission
Mailwarm
@tina_chhabra Oooh, I thought I'm the only one that skips. But sometimes this Onboarding are needed.
Maybe they should be in the menu or helpdesk ?
For a whole lot of time i was actually the one adding on endless feature on my project. It took some time before i finally sat back and looked at the entire app and was like okay maybe i over-did it. It's very easy to want your project to solve all the world's problems. but it's wiser to stay simple, and adhere to the UNIX philosophy, i.e make your product do one thing, and make it do it well.
Mailwarm
@anas_chhilif Happened to me multiple time and the worst is never launching after.
We're experiencing this right now as we continue building our MVP (a website UX/UI audit tool). The feedback we got from users this week was "it's incredibly thorough, so much so that I don't need to use it again for a while"... oops! We want people returning.