Don’t Make An All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

In the land of startups, a baffling and remarkably persistent trend exists: the obsession with feature overload. If you look at any startup pitch deck, you'll inevitably find the infamous slide featuring a competitor/feature checklist. This slide sole reason of existence is to brag about all the features you have over your competition: The more green checkmarks, the better.

And herein lies the fundamental flaw: People don’t want more features, they want better products. Just think about your favorite products or services – I bet you, that you love them not because they have a huge number of features, but because they do something specific very, very well.

By cramming as many features as possible into a product, you not only create a quality, usability and customer experience mess, you also confuse the heck out of your clients.

Startups are not all-you-can-eat buffets, offering every dish under the sun, but a chef’s tasting menu, where each course—each feature—is thoughtfully curated and impeccably executed.

The sooner startups understand and implement the philosophy of design legend Dieter Rams' "weniger, aber besser" (less but better), the better their chances of creating something truly exceptional.

We don't need more features. We need the right ones, executed to perfection.

I, for one, am looking forward to see the startup pitch deck which has a feature slide showing less functionality than the competition. Oh, and by the way: The very same is true for any product or service coming from Big Corp… Less, but better my friends.