Ask a team what they shipped this year and you will get a list. Ask what they killed and the room goes quiet. Liam Nugent has twice refused to build the two features everyone asks for in consumer finance apps — a document hub and a notifications centre — and his essay is the case for those refusals.

Both features follow the same shape:

  • A real problem underneath: legacy systems emit PDFs, and compliance wants a “persistent communications channel”
  • A lazy solution that looks simple: a list of files, or a bell icon with a red dot
  • Stakeholders adding “just one more thing” until you have rebuilt Google Drive or a bad Gmail clone
  • A permissions model, per-platform quirks across every iOS release cycle, and a maintenance bill that never ends

The build cost turns out to be the small number. What actually changes stakeholders’ minds is seeing the running cost laid out over years — that “tends to bring people back from the brink.” And killing the platform does not remove the original problem, so he takes each use case on its own merits and asks whether it needs an entire platform before it can be said at all. Most of the time the answer is something simple or something that already exists, “even if it isn’t perfect.”

Removal is where it gets hard, and it is not simply cowardice. Gerry McGovern’s Top Tasks work found that stripping 80–90% of a site’s content made companies sell more and cut support calls. Klotz and colleagues ran eight experiments in Nature and found people systematically overlook subtractive changes even when removing is obviously the better move — additive ideas arrive cheaply, subtractive ones cost real cognitive effort. So we are hard wired against the move that often works.

Nugent’s counter to “building is nearly free now” is the sharpest part. If execution is cheap, spend it on the pruning and maintenance work nobody was ever going to get around to by hand — removal as the improvement itself, not the tidying up afterwards. Be extremely choosy about what gets added. Be militant about taking things out.