4 Signs Your Product Is Overcomplicated — and How to Fix It

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Key Takeaways

Don’t mistake complexity for sophistication. The best solution isn’t always the most feature-rich one — it’s the one that democratizes access to the most valuable features, so more people can use them.
When you’re too close to your product, you become a perfectionist and end up designing needlessly complicated systems that ignore the customer’s real needs.
A comprehensive solution hides its complexity behind intuitive UX, expands the user base from specialists to everyday operators and makes difficult problems feel easy to solve.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my career is not to mistake complexity for sophistication.

I’ve always been a tinkerer. Before I ran PhoneBurner, my current company that streamlines dialing for outbound teams, I used to stay up until the small hours of the morning in my home workshop just trying to build things from scratch. Back then, I wasn’t even sure I wanted tech to be my career. I just knew I was interested in creating things that solved problems.

Some of the things I created ended up being pretty useful. One was an app that sat on top of CRM systems to help users visualize data more easily. Today, user-friendly reporting features are a de facto requirement for this kind of software, but that wasn’t always the case. It used to be that you needed deep technical knowledge to parse the info CRMs collected.

Of course, that also meant fewer people were able to use them. A decade ago, when CRMs were less user-friendly, the global market was worth just over $26 billion. By contrast, most current estimates put it at over $100 billion.

My point is: The best solution isn’t always the most feature-rich one. It’s the one that democratizes access to the most valuable features, so more people can use them.

Why founders overengineer

As a founder, you probably know your core product better than most, and you want it to impress others. But either of these factors can make you lose perspective.

When you’re too close to your product, you become a perfectionist. Even rare or outlying problems feel critically important. When you focus too much on earning acclaim from industry peers or investors, you end up designing needlessly complicated systems. In both cases, the same thing happens: You end up focused on edge cases instead of the customer’s essential needs.

Often, founders who make these mistakes assume that more capability automatically translates into more value. But that isn’t always true. In fact, focusing too much on edge cases is more likely to compromise the core of your product.

There’s a story that in the 1970s and 80s, the former Soviet Union commissioned the nation’s top electrical engineers to design electric guitars rather than import them from the West. The guys in charge of the project were brilliant, but they weren’t musicians. So they weren’t thinking about features that improved playability; they were thinking about how impressive it would be to stuff each guitar full of experimental electronics.

The results were technically impressive and looked like nothing else being made at the time. They also played terribly. In setting out to impress party bosses and push the limits of engineering, the designers had ignored what makes a guitar valuable in the first place.

How to spot the early warning signs that your product is overengineered

So now that you know why people tend to overengineer, how can you stop yourself from doing it? In my career, I’ve come across a few clear signals that you might be overcomplicating your solution:

You keep adding just one more feature to close a hypothetical gap, but it never feels finished. The more you add, the more you notice that appears to be missing. In reality, you may just be moving the goalposts.
You need to educate your own team extensively before they feel enabled to sell what you’ve designed. If it’s not intuitive to them, it probably won’t be intuitive to customers.
You’re designing for the exceptions, not the 80% of users or use cases that are more common.
Your MVP feels more like a platform than a product. A versatile solution is valuable, but an unfocused one isn’t.

What a comprehensive solution should look like

It might seem like this whole article is just an argument for simplicity, but that’s not actually what I’m saying. You can still develop a powerful and broadly useful product that manages to avoid being overengineered.

This is not necessarily about removing functionality. You just need to focus on making your product accessible and user-friendly. Here’s what a comprehensive solution can and should do when it’s designed carefully:

A comprehensive solution hides its complexity behind intuitive UX. For example, PhoneBurner, the power dialing platform I run for outbound calling teams, uses programmable disposition buttons to help users streamline complex follow-up tasks after calls and create more efficient workflows.
A comprehensive solution also expands the user base from technical specialists to everyday operators. My app for CRM systems helped make it so that you no longer needed to be a statistician to interpret the data from your software. We’ve since carried the same philosophy into PhoneBurner with intuitive real-time reporting that anyone on a sales team can understand at a glance.
Above all, a comprehensive solution takes a difficult problem and makes the solution feel easy. For example, calling more prospects shouldn’t require you to master a brand new system, which is why it was important to lower the barrier to entry for our dialing platform and make sure new users could be up and running with a free trial in minutes.

So yes: Sophisticated things can be complicated, but complicated things aren’t necessarily sophisticated. Maybe that’s also why some of the most concise advice I’ve been given in my life has also felt the most profound — see the link at the end of this article for more on that subject.

Ultimately, there’s little value in window dressing for its own sake. But the solutions that appear simplest from the outside are often surprisingly elegant when you take the time to understand where they come from. That elegance, and the intent behind it, are usually what make the difference between a comprehensive solution and a complicated one.

Key Takeaways

Don’t mistake complexity for sophistication. The best solution isn’t always the most feature-rich one — it’s the one that democratizes access to the most valuable features, so more people can use them.
When you’re too close to your product, you become a perfectionist and end up designing needlessly complicated systems that ignore the customer’s real needs.
A comprehensive solution hides its complexity behind intuitive UX, expands the user base from specialists to everyday operators and makes difficult problems feel easy to solve.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my career is not to mistake complexity for sophistication.

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