Five years ago, I sat in a board meeting getting grilled about our product roadmap. We had just added our 47th feature that quarter—an elaborate workflow automation tool that our enterprise customers swore they needed. The problem? Only 1% of our users ever touched it. Meanwhile, our support tickets were through the roof, and new customers were taking months to onboard.
That’s when I realized we’d fallen into the same trap I’d been trying to help our customers escape: we’d turned something simple into something unnecessarily complex.
The Day I Became a Feature Killer
Let me be clear: I used to be that founder who wanted to add “just 10 more lines of code” to handle every edge case. When customers asked for features, I’d say yes. When competitors launched something new, we’d build it too. Our contract management software was becoming the Cheesecake Factory of CLM tools—a menu so vast that no one knew what to order.
The turning point came during COVID when we had to restructure. We analyzed our entire feature set and discovered something shocking: 90% of our users were using just 20% of our features. We were maintaining mountains of code that almost no one touched. Worse, these rarely-used features were making our core product harder to understand and slower to adopt.
So I made a decision that would have horrified my younger self: we started removing features.
The Hidden Cost of “Just One More Feature”
Here’s what most founders don’t realize about feature bloat: it’s not just about code complexity. Every feature you add creates a cascade of hidden costs:
- Maintenance overhead: That “simple” feature needs bug fixes, security updates, and compatibility checks forever
- User confusion: More options mean more decisions, leading to analysis paralysis
- Support burden: Complex products generate exponentially more support tickets
- Development slowdown: New features must integrate with all existing ones, making each addition harder than the last
- Performance degradation: More features mean more code, slower load times, and higher infrastructure costs
The research backs this up. Studies show that 8 out of 10 people delete apps because they can’t figure out how to use them. In the B2B world, this translates to longer sales cycles, painful implementations, and higher churn rates.
How We Cut Our Way to Success
Over the next 18 months, we systematically removed or hid features that weren’t delivering value. Here’s our process:
1. Data-driven identification: We tracked actual feature usage, not just what customers said they wanted. If less than 5% of users touched a feature in 90 days, it went on the chopping block.
2. Strategic hiding: Some features we couldn’t remove entirely (existing customers depended on them), so we hid them from new users. This gave us the best of both worlds—supporting legacy users while simplifying the experience for new ones.
3. Template consolidation: We had dozens of contract templates trying to serve every possible use case. We reduced them to five core templates that covered 95% of needs.
4. Workflow simplification: Instead of offering infinite customization, we provided three pre-built workflows that users could slightly modify. This moved us from “anything is possible” to “here’s what works.”
5. Integration focus: Rather than building every feature ourselves, we integrated with best-in-class tools our customers already used. Why build a mediocre calendar when you can integrate with Google Calendar?
The Surprising Results
The outcomes exceeded our wildest expectations:
- Customer satisfaction scores increased by 127% as users could actually find and use the features they needed
- Time to first value dropped from 45 days to 7 days because the onboarding process became straightforward
- Support tickets decreased by 68% despite growing our customer base
- Development velocity increased 3x as our team spent less time maintaining unused features
- Sales cycles shortened by 40% because demos focused on core value rather than feature tours
But here’s the most interesting part: we actually started winning more enterprise deals. Why? Because even enterprise buyers were tired of bloated software. They wanted tools their teams would actually adopt, not another shelfware purchase.
Crafting Simplicity (It’s Harder Than It Looks)
As I often tell my team: you don’t invent simplicity, you craft it. Apple didn’t create the iPhone by adding every possible feature—they ruthlessly eliminated until only the essential remained. My grandmother uses an iPhone without a manual. That’s the gold standard.
The same principle applies to B2B software. Your users aren’t looking for Swiss Army knives; they’re looking for tools that solve specific problems exceptionally well. The challenge is that achieving simplicity requires saying no—a lot.
Here’s my framework for maintaining simplicity:
Always ask: “Will we still do this in 5 years?” If the answer is no, why build it now? This question has saved us from countless trendy features that would have become technical debt.
Remove before you add: For every new feature, identify one to remove or consolidate. This forces discipline and prevents gradual bloat.
Make the common case fast: Optimize for what 80% of users do 80% of the time. Let edge cases be slightly harder rather than compromising the core experience.
Listen to what users do, not what they say: Feature requests often mask underlying problems. Dig deeper to understand the real need.
The Path Forward: AI and the Next Wave of Simplification
Today, as AI transforms how we interact with software, I see another opportunity for radical simplification. Why navigate complex menus when you can just ask for what you need? Why manually configure workflows when AI can learn your patterns?
At Concord, we’re using AI not to add more features, but to make existing ones invisible. Imagine contract lifecycle management software that just knows what you need and presents it at the right moment. That’s the future we’re building toward.
Your Turn: Conducting a Feature Audit
If you’re a founder or product leader reading this, I challenge you to conduct your own feature audit:
- Measure actual usage: Don’t guess. Use analytics to see what features people really use.
- Calculate the true cost: Include development, maintenance, support, and opportunity cost.
- Talk to churned customers: Often they’ll tell you the product was “too complicated” or “overwhelming.”
- Start small: Pick one feature to remove or hide. See what happens.
- Communicate the why: Users appreciate honesty about making the product better, not bigger.
Remember: in a world where every competitor is adding features, subtraction can be your greatest differentiation. Your users don’t want more features—they want to get their job done and go home.
The hardest part isn’t the technical work of removing code. It’s overcoming the psychological barrier that equates more features with more value. But once you break through that barrier, you’ll discover what we did: sometimes the best feature you can ship is the one you don’t.
Matt Lhoumeau is the co-founder and CEO of Concord, where he’s on a mission to make contract management so simple that lawyers become optional for most businesses. Before founding Concord, he survived six months of manual contract hell at a $5 billion telecom company, an experience that convinced him there had to be a better way.
