Subtract relentlessly

The default gravity of software is accretion. Every release adds a field someone asked for, a toggle to cover an edge case, a step to satisfy a stakeholder. Nothing ever leaves, because removing things feels risky and adding things feels responsive. A few years of that and the product is a museum of everyone’s good intentions.

I treat every element as a liability until it proves otherwise. A field has to be filled, validated, stored, migrated, and read by a tired person at 9am. A step has to be understood and survived. The honest question for anything on the screen is not “is this useful?” – almost everything is faintly useful – it’s “what breaks if this is gone?”

On the DMV redesign, the single highest-leverage change wasn’t a new feature. It was deleting one optional field that quietly cost an estimated two thousand staff-hours a year to reconcile. Subtraction is rarely the obvious move and almost never the one that gets you credit – but it’s usually the one that makes the product better to use and cheaper to keep alive.

Done well, subtraction isn’t austerity. It’s respect – for the person using the thing, and for the team who has to maintain it after I’ve gone.