The principle that every feature kept alive imposes an ongoing complexity cost — extra buttons, menus, settings, support burden — on every user, not just the ones who use it. That cost is a tax the whole product pays even when only a small, vocal minority benefits.
Biddle's rule of thumb: build for the ~20% who'd love a genuinely delightful new capability (see DHM Framework (Delight, Hard-to-Copy, Margin-Enhancing)), but say no to keeping a shipped feature alive for a similarly small minority once it's already live — at that point the calculus flips from delight to tax. He cites Zoom's proliferation of options as the failure mode this discipline is meant to prevent, and contrasts it with Value as Totality of Experience, Not Feature Count: value comes from the coherence of the whole experience, and an accumulating pile of low-usage features erodes that coherence rather than adding to it.
Netflix repeatedly killed social-viewing features that drew a passionate but small minority: Friends (2009), Xbox party mode (2010), and Tell a Friend (2018) each landed around 5-6% adoption. Biddle cites this history as the reason not to reflexively build a native "Netflix Party," even though a third-party clone grew virally from 500k to 1M users in 2020 — because every feature kept alive for that minority imposes an ongoing UI/complexity tax on the whole product, in direct tension with a "movie enjoyment made easy" brand promise.
"What Do Product Managers Do?" (children's-book reading) states the tax plainly for a general audience: products "always change, improve, and evolve," and "every addition should result in deletions." This is the same discipline as the feature tax — every new feature carries an ongoing cost, so shipping something new should trigger a corresponding removal rather than pure accumulation. See Practice Accumulation Without Subtraction (Cognitive Overload) for the failure mode when this discipline is skipped.
Из тем: Netflix, Consumer Science, and Strategy Storytelling