Look at any enterprise software demo and you'll see it: slide after slide of features. Checkboxes. Integrations. Customizations. "We do everything your current solution does, plus these 47 other things."
Every competitor's product demo looks like the cockpit of a 747. Ours should look like the dashboard of a classic car, so simple and purposeful that anyone can understand what it does and why it matters within seconds. Not because we can't build complexity, but because we choose not to.
We are not the center of the universe
When you're building products, it's easy to think the answer is always more. More features. More settings. More ways to customize.
But more doesn't always mean better. It usually means harder to use. Harder to maintain. Harder to keep aligned across a team.
This is the trap many products fall into. They see themselves as the center of the universe. They forget the context they actually operate in.
Take Aha! or Productboard. Most teams bring them in for a specific job: collecting customer feedback or keeping stakeholders up to date. Simple enough.
But with hundreds of millions in funding, solving one simple use case isn't enough. They have to be "strategic." They have to justify those valuations.
And that's when the bloat sets in. Every bell and whistle gets added. More features. More overlap with tools you're already using. Another dashboard. Another login. Another source of truth to manage.
The worst part? Teams pay for a ton of features they don't even use. They're subsidizing someone else's feature requests, someone else's edge cases, someone else's complexity.
We're not playing that game.
Focus is our competitive advantage
When we say no to a feature, we're not being lazy. We're being disciplined. Every feature we don't build is:
A bug we don't introduce
A piece of complexity we don't add
A documentation page we don't write
A support ticket we don't field
Our competitors will always have more features than us. Good. Let them explain why users need yet another OKR tool, whiteboard or place to manage documents. Let them maintain the code that powers the customizable dashboard widget that 0.5% of their users touched once.
We build for the 80% of use cases that matter most, and are happy to leave the rest to someone else.
"But customer X really needs..."
But do they really?
They think they need it because they've been trained by decades of bloated software to expect everything to be customizable, configurable, and complicated. They've developed elaborate workarounds for simple problems because that's what their current tools demand.
When Customer X says they need an advanced filtering system with 19 parameters, what they're really saying is: "I need to find the right information quickly." Build that. Not the 19 parameters.
We're not in the business of recreating broken workflows. We're in the business of making those workflows obsolete.
Beautiful constraints
Constraints breed creativity. Not just for us, but for our users.
When you give someone unlimited options, they freeze. When you give them well designed boundaries, they excel. Instagram didn't succeed by building a Photoshop style editor, it succeeded by letting you apply a limited set if filters, fast and intuitively.
By building on top of Jira, we inherit constraints. Some would see this as a limitation. We see it as opportunity. We don't have to rebuild all the power that Jira and the Atlassian platform already provides. Whether that's high level planning with goals and projects, or low level prioritization.
Instead, we can focus all our energy on the few things we're uniquely positioned to do well: collecting and managing customer feedback, identifying opportunities and enabling product communication. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Every feature we choose to build is a vote for what we believe matters. Every feature we refuse to build is equally important — it's choosing who we are and who we're not.
The second source of truth problem
Every time a product tries to be everything, it creates what it claims to solve: chaos.
You end up with customer feedback in three places. Roadmaps in four. Tasks in five. And someone's full-time job becomes keeping them all in sync.
A little overlap is fine, even unavoidable. But great products don't try to own every part of your workflow. They fit smoothly into it.
Your product is not the center of your customer's universe. It's a single tool in their toolbox. The sooner we accept this, the better we can serve them.
The one thing we do
We are building the best tool for customer feedback and product communication. Period.
Not the most flexible. Not the most powerful. Not the most enterprise-ready. The best at the one job it's hired to do.
Amazon sells everything, but they started with books. Google does everything, but they started with search. They didn't add the second thing until the first thing was undeniably, unquestionably excellent.
Neither should we.
We focus on the essentials. No resource planning. No OKR tracking. No trying to replace your entire stack. Just the core job that teams actually hired us to do, done exceptionally well.
How we build
Before we add any feature, we ask:
Does this make our core purpose stronger, or does it dilute it?
Will 80% of our users benefit from this, or just the loudest 5%?
Can we maintain this at the highest quality forever, or will it rot?
Does this make the product simpler to understand, or more complex?
Are we reducing the number of tools teams need, or becoming yet another one?
If the answer to any of these questions is wrong, we don't build it. We don't put it on the roadmap. We don't say "maybe later." We say no, and we move on.
The courage to ship half a product
Reid Hoffman said, "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." But people misunderstand this quote. It's not about shipping something broken. It's about shipping something focused.
We're not shipping half a product because we're lazy or rushed. We're shipping half a product because the other half is bullshit that the world doesn't need.
Our half of a product should work twice as well as their whole product.
A bet on taste
Saying no to features is a bet that we know what matters better than the accumulated feature requests of a thousand customers. That's an arrogant bet. It's also the only bet worth making.
We're betting that teams don't want another all-in-one solution. They want tools that play well with others. They want their existing investments to work better, not to be replaced.
We're not trying to build a product that does everything adequately. We're building a product that does a few things so well that people can't imagine doing it any other way.
The path forward
We're taking a different path with Released. We are not chasing features. We are not chasing the next funding round. We're chasing simplicity.
No feature bloat. No paying for things you'll never use.
By doing less, we can do it better. Sometimes less really is more.
That's how you build something people don't just use, but love.
Let's build something that matters.
