Make the Right Tradeoffs

If Uber was built without a product manager's vision, the app would have looked wildly different.

Instead of auto-matching you to the appropriate driver, it would have popped up a list of drivers in the area & asked you to choose one - forcing you to retry if the driver didn't respond.

If this was the final design, Uber may not have caught traction quickly. That extra decision at the user's end may have killed the magic.

Uber chose consciously to bring that complexity in-house rather than have the user deal with it.

But simplifying the customer experience does come at an engineering cost.

That cost, in the longer scheme of things, can have massive payoffs.

Or not.

If a PM always chooses to build for sophistication, that slows down progress with little gains.

That's why building products are a lot about making the right tradeoffs.

PMs need to know when to sacrifice certain complexity in the product for time-to-market & vice versa.

& here's where strong engineers keep PMs honest. As soon as complexity catapults, they raise red flags.

They demand solid rationale from PMs to justify features that require months of development & expertise.

With deep understanding of customers, the best PMs know which battles to pick and which to let go.