How Complexity Quietly Accumulates in a Product

3 MINS

Whether I was building consumer products, running a retail business or designing enterprise procurement workflows, I kept seeing the same pattern. Organisations rarely struggle because they are short of ideas. They struggle because complexity builds up slowly until every decision is slower, every exception is permanent and every new feature makes the system harder to understand.

Exceptions are cheap to add and expensive to keep

An exception usually starts as a reasonable answer to a real problem. One customer, one region, one unusual case. Nobody plans for it to last. But once something depends on it, removing it becomes a project of its own, and so it stays. Multiply that over years and the product is mostly exceptions.

Every feature has a maintenance cost

My early years were in testing and QA, at Cisco, SoftDEL and Fab.com. That work makes the cost of each feature very visible, because every new path through the system is another thing to test on every release. Product teams that see that cost early tend to say no more often, and their products stay easier to use.

Make removal part of the roadmap

Roadmaps are usually lists of things to add. I find it useful to also ask what we can simplify, merge or retire. Removing a rarely used option is real product work. It lowers support load and makes the rest of the product easier to learn.

Name the trade-off out loud

Most complexity comes from avoiding a hard choice. Supporting both options feels safer than choosing one. Saying the trade-off clearly, and deciding which side the product takes, is uncomfortable for a moment and much cheaper over time.

Simple is a decision

Simplicity does not happen by accident. It is the result of many small decisions to leave things out, made consistently by people who understand the cost of putting them in.

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Junisha skipped presentations and built real AI products.

Junisha Malkani was part of the August 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 24 other talented participants.