Smart People Always Mess This Up

Your biggest liability might be that your team is smart.

When you put smart people in a room to solve a problem, they start to consider every possibility. Every potential customer. Every feature they might want. Every edge case. Whiteboards fill up. Sticky notes cover the walls. It feels like progress because they’ve thought of everything.

But that’s a trap. It’s the curse of being smart, and it’s how great projects die a slow death by over-engineering.

Think about the world’s most-loved cities. Paris, London, New York. From a planning perspective, they’re a mess. They’re inefficient, confusing, and suboptimal in a thousand ways. Now think of the master-planned utopian communities designed by geniuses to be perfect. They’re almost always sterile, artificial, and half-empty. They feel like living in the Matrix.

Great cities work because they didn’t start with a grand plan. They started as a few huts and grew organically, solving one problem at a time based on the real needs of the moment. They evolved.

Your product, your service, your entire business should work the same way. If you try to build directly toward an idealized grand vision, you’ll have something half-finished and useless for years. By the time you’re done, the market will have changed, or you’ll discover your initial assumptions were wrong anyway.

The smarter path is to start with a few huts and evolve.

This is brutally hard for most people, especially designers and experts. We love to talk about minimalism, but when it’s time to build, we overthink and over-engineer. We have to fight this instinct every single day.

If your new offering feels complete and comfortable, you’ve probably overdone it. A truly lean launch should feel uncomfortable. It should feel like, “I can’t believe we’re releasing this. It’s missing 90% of what we planned.”

That feeling of discomfort is how you know you’re getting it right. You’ve cut it down to the absolute core. It’s just enough to provide a sliver of value and, more importantly, to get customers to tell you what’s really missing.

That feedback is gold. It’s the difference between building what you assume people want and building what they actually need.

Look at the traditional way things get built versus the lean, evolutionary path.

The Old Way:

• Build feature A

• Build feature B

• Build feature C

• Build feature D

• Build feature E

• Launch after a year, hoping you guessed right.

The Better Way:

• Launch with only feature A.

• Learn that customers are screaming for feature E.

• Build feature E.

• Learn that what they really need next is feature G.

• Build feature G.

This is the shortest path to creating something that feels like you read your customers’ minds. Because you did. And you save a fortune by not building the features it turns out they never really cared about.

This requires the courage to launch something small, something incomplete, something that makes you feel exposed. It requires admitting you don’t have all the answers. But it’s the only way to build something that truly works.

Take a hard look at what you’re building. If it feels like you’re trying to cover all the bases, you’re probably overthinking it. Strip it down to its core and see what happens.