The Anti-Feature: Removing Things to Win

Everyone talks about adding features. Build this, launch that. The metrics obsession means teams always want to expand. But the smartest moves? Deletion.

Instagram removed Stories from the main feed. Better? Absolutely. TikTok’s entire strategy is removing the “like” count visibility to reduce gaming. Twitter killed threading requirements. Every change made the core experience cleaner.

Removing features is harder than adding them though. There’s stakeholder pushback. Engineers worry about edge cases. Marketing wants to keep “everything” in the spec sheet. But features create surface area. More options = more confusion = worse UX.

When you remove something deliberately, you’re essentially saying: this wasn’t aligned with our core. We’re willing to lose users who relied on it to make the product better for everyone else.

The anti-feature is the feature that says no. No, we won’t add settings bloat. No, we won’t support legacy stuff forever. No, we won’t slow the experience down to please power users.

Iteration isn’t always addition. Sometimes it’s subtraction. And that takes courage.