The dark side of incrementalism.

Incrementalism is incredibly useful, but it can also carve deep ruts that trap your users in an endlessly bad experience and keep your product from scaling.

Incrementalism has the power to build incredible products. But without adequate leadership, strategy, and planning, it can also do incredible harm. Bad product experiences aren’t hard to find. Some suffer due to lack of planning, focus or value. Some from poor quality of design or execution. And some are the result of incrementalism that has gone from creating real value to creating impenetrable complexity that fails to deliver on a promise of value.

A Cautionary Tale

Most everyone is familiar with iTunes. Its release came shortly after the Napster case in 2001 and it revolutionized how we listen to music. Since then the application has evolved to include a wide spectrum of music-related functionality to the point of being an unusable mess. It opened the door to competitors like Spotify to carve off a nice niche of their market by providing a product with very specific functionality and great usability. Now, almost 20 years since its creation, the end is near. Fortunately, a big company like Apple has the resources to adjust and align the iTunes’ successors to its larger strategy. Many products that fall into this trap aren’t so lucky.

Incrementalism can have a negative effect in a variety of ways:

The people who purchase and use these products might get used to the chaos. Spend enough time on any application and mastering the nuances of poor user experience might be attainable. But then again, they might not. They might leave. Or choose a competitor's product.

>And as bad as that is, the effects on the business itself are even worse…

The Tractor Pull

You might be familiar with an old fashioned tractor pull. If you’re not, the concept is quite simple. A high-powered tractor or truck runs a straight track while pulling a weight that gets increasingly heavy as progress is made. Some competitors make it further than others, but inevitably the weight becomes too much and the race ends with engines roaring and tires spinning while going nowhere.

Perhaps the biggest danger in incrementalism is the potential to scale a product to a point that it is too large to scale any further and practically impossible to significantly improve or recreate. In a marketplace where speed, efficiency, and effectiveness are a competitive advantage, working in increments is highly valuable to a point. Somewhere along the line, production begins to slow. If the underlying structural issues go unaddressed, it becomes a soul-sucking slog. Years of band-aids, workarounds, and overall tech and design debt accumulate and progress grinds to a halt. The reaction is usually to create new band-aids and new workarounds but this only has the effect of prolonging the suffering and slowing down future work even more.

Pay now or pay later (with interest)

This effect is very common in instances where the Agile process is poorly implemented. When seen only as a mechanism to create efficiency, Agile has the tendency to favor quick wins and instant gratification over implementing a larger strategy that is deliberate in migrating and transforming systems in a way that sustains and grows them over time. The result is an ever-increasing amount of design and development debt.

Design and development debt can be paid now, or it can be paid later with compounding interest. But it will be paid one way or another. Like managing money, the goal is to plan and borrow strategically.

What is the cost of this debt? It may be the cost of additional resources to design and develop new features. It might be a sub-standard user experience. It might be lost sales, revenue and future growth. And if never dealt with, in our highly competitive and fast-moving technology marketplace, it might be the eventual end of a once viable business or product.

Paying down the debt

How do you pay down debt? The same way you would pay down financial debt. By taking an account of those debts and making a plan. By being strategic about what provides the biggest return on allocated resources. And by recognizing that by paying down this debt, the return is not a new marketable feature, but almost always an increase in speed, efficiency, and effectiveness moving forward. This investment potentially has a multiplier effect across all product design and development yielding compounding returns.

Avoiding the trap of incrementalism is not easy. But with strategy, planning and good execution, the dark side can be avoided and incrementalism can be leveraged to achieve amazing results.