opinionated design doesn't scale past a point 🤔
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opinionated design is always one of 2 things -- a stand-in for future educated-customer opinions OR a stand-in for future science
if either customers get educated enough, or the intuitive science doesn't validate, opinionated design kinda crashes and burns
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By "opinionated design" I am not talking about the 99% commodity design decisions that don't really matter much (ie could be made differently and make no difference) that users don't really care about, but the 1% where users intuitively disagree but you decide you know better
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Even where they do come around to your point of view on the 1%, scaling means you have to revisit at every scale, and just because you were right at the first scale doesn't mean you'll continue to be right at future scales
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And the information asymmetry erodes... users learn and might end up with better intuitions than you, and intuitions all around might get replaced with objective principles that get at what's really going on beneath what seemed like a matter of taste/ideology
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for eg, early on decentralization/centralization might be a matter of opinionated design and your choices might happen to be correct for first round of scaling... but eventually objective principles emerge for where to centralize and where to decentralize, and users learn too
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if you persist in perpetuating initially ungrounded opinions in light of the emergence of more nuanced principles that complicate things, and more sophisticated dissent from people who can now keep up and maybe even know better, you kinda end up in a solipsistic end game
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this is why businesses and products tend to naturally evolve from product driven/opinionated to customer-driven/principled over time as they evolve to maturity
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