A year of saying no to features

I started keeping a note of every feature I talked a client out of building. Not ones they dropped — ones I argued against.

Over a year it was a longer list than the things I built.

What was on it

Dashboards nobody would open. Notification systems that would be muted inside a fortnight. Configuration screens for settings that would be set once and never touched. An approval workflow for a decision one person had always made alone and always would.

Every one was individually reasonable. Every one would have been used twice.

What I say now

Let's build it without that, and if you miss it in a month, we add it. Adding is easy. Removing is a conversation nobody wants to have.

Almost nobody misses it. That is the part that still surprises me. The feature felt essential in the meeting and unmissed in practice, because meetings are where people imagine using software and reality is where they actually do.

The commercial bit

This costs me money on every project and it is the single biggest reason clients come back. Nobody has ever recommended me because I built everything they asked for. Several have recommended me because I did not.