I really liked this week’s reading because it was very easy to think about how I perceive innovation, change, and loss with the products and platforms I use myself. I thought it was interesting how easily teams can overestimate what people actually want. Gourville talks about how companies tend to overvalue their own innovations because they are almost too deep in it, and it’s easy to be convinced customers will feel the same way. This can lead to feature creep, which is when products and platforms keep adding new features and new ideas in an effort to seem more interesting or competitive.
This is a problem because more features don’t always mean more value, especially for consumers who hate change and value innovation way less than the teams producing it. New features actually make a product harder to use, slower to learn, and overwhelming for customers who already feel attached to the simpler, older version. He explains that people overvalue what they already know and dislike unnecessary change. When a new version feels confusing, users see it as a loss and don’t want to use it.
You can see this in apps that start clean and focused, then gradually pile on functions until they lose their core purpose. In my own personal experience, it’s kind of like Instagram. Instagram started as simple photo sharing and then it created stories, shopping, messaging, and now it has AI feeds and reels. Since all these new features were added, I have deleted the app because there is so much nonsense that it feels overwhelming and unusable. From the creators of the platform, these features are exciting and innovative and they think they will draw new users. But from the outside, they feel really noisy.
To avoid this phenomenon, product managers have to balance innovation with restraint. That means speaking for the user, understanding what the consumer wants, and having to push back when stakeholders want to add their own features. It’s important that PMs don’t get caught up in the excitement of creating more.
I think good PMs learn to say “no” more often than “yes.” They focus on clarity of value: what problem are we solving, and is this new feature helping or distracting from that? Avoiding feature creep is about empathy and discipline and valuing simplicity and familiar user experience, sometimes above innovation.
