Where's My Cheese?

I recently came across this rethinking of the Amazon way and this interview where we hear that Spotify is pushing ~4500 production releases a day. Both are worth a dive, but they dance around the edges of what I see as the biggest challenge in digital product creation.

They explore how agentic loops are shifting the way development happens, one from the engineering perspective and one from the digital product creation lens. However, neither addresses the issue of what I would call feature fatigue. Interestingly on the AI tooling adoption side, there are some indications that the pace of innovation may be problematic - but I haven't seen it hit the discourse for general digital product development.

There are other signs that personalization fatigue is a risk, but I haven't found a clear view centering how to think about change rate management. I suspect the general approach - use consumer signals to detect negative impacts to KPIs - would give you some sense of an issue, but it doesn't really capture my concern. If you ship a hundred features and both the cost and lift are low - is that a bad thing, should you pull them, leave them? How do we think about the risks of fragmenting our users across so many paths?

Whether the challenge is feature glut or splitting users across infinite new products, it seems like we'll need new dimensions to determine value.

Better still maybe we need to reset what to do with all of this newfound productivity - maybe the answer should be turning the infinite pipeline towards proving that less is more. As a user of some of these rapidly iterating products, I know I don't get much if any value from the frequent changes, mostly I'm annoyed or at best I just ignore the updates.

In the end if you get me to buy your shoe with a frictionless checkout, but your shoe falls apart on the trail - I'll be a lot less happy than having a frustrating purchase experience but end up owning a shoe that takes me where I want to go.