"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things."
"But wait, we have AI now. We don't have to say no to 1,000 things. We can say yes to all the things - generate them all, simultaneously! Do you really have to "pick carefully" when AI can materialize everything you previously would've been too constrained to do? Generative technology paired with being "data-driven" means it's easy to build every idea, ship it, measure it, and see what sticks."
"But maybe the scarcity of organizational resources was the wrong focus all along? It's never been a good idea to ship everything you think of. Every addition accretes complexity and comes with a cognitive cost. Maybe we need to reframe the concept of scarcity from us, the makers of software, to them, the users of software. Their resources are what matter most:"
AI and generative tools remove many traditional resource constraints, making it easy to build, ship, and measure large numbers of ideas. Shipping every idea increases product complexity and imposes cognitive costs on users. User-constrained resources — attention, stability, clarity, and coherence — determine whether new features provide value. Prioritizing and saying no protects user attention, preserves learnability, reduces confusion, and maintains a unified product story. Data-driven quick experiments can mislead if they ignore user burdens. Product decisions should reframe scarcity around user capacity and prioritize restraint and coherence alongside experimentation.
Read at Jim-nielsen
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