Limit the details

I think this is the best insight I’ve heard about creating products:

“You have to make every single detail perfect and you have to limit the number of details.”

— Jack Dorsey⁠

The second half makes the first half possible.

Every feature adds details. Another screen, another setting, another state where something can go wrong. And those details interact with everything you already built. The surface you need to care about keeps growing.

Limiting that surface gives you room to care deeply. How fast something opens. Whether the wording makes sense. What happens when the connection drops. Small things, but together they determine how the product feels.

This becomes even more relevant as building software gets easier. When you can add a feature in an afternoon, you need a stronger reason to include it than the fact that you can build it.

I like this advice because it gives you two questions to keep asking: does this need to exist? And if it does, have we paid enough attention to it?