Platform Thinking vs Feature Thinking

Early in a product’s life, features feel like progress. At scale, features become liabilities.

Across platform products, teams that optimized for feature delivery accumulated complexity faster than value. Each feature added surface area, dependencies, and long-term maintenance cost.

Platform thinking required a shift toward fewer primitives, clearer contracts, and extensibility over customization.

Platforms succeeded when they made the right things easy and the wrong things hard.

Over time, this reinforced a discipline of subtraction — deciding what not to build became as important as deciding what to build.