In 2012, Netflix was a meticulously organized catalog that helped you discover films and shows across genres, decades, and continents. In 2015, Spotify was a music lover’s sanctuary that put your personal library and thoughtful exploration front and center. Fast forward to today, and these platforms—along with YouTube, LinkedIn, and countless others—have morphed into something unrecognizable to their early adopters.

The culprit? A relentless pursuit of “innovation” that prioritizes engagement metrics over user intent, growth at all costs over genuine utility, and the marginal user over the dedicated enthusiast.

We’ve been sold a lie.

For decades, product leaders have justified sweeping changes by quoting Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This quote—almost certainly apocryphal—has become the holy scripture of Silicon Valley’s disruptors, a convenient excuse to ignore what users actually want in favor of “visionary” product decisions.

But what if users really did want a faster horse? What if that wasn’t such a bad idea after all?

The Illusion of Progress

Look around. Our digital landscape isn’t evolving—it’s devolving. What we’re witnessing isn’t innovation but regression wrapped in the shiny packaging of “progress.”

Netflix, once a beautifully organized catalog that empowered discovery, has transformed into an endless, algorithm-driven scroll designed to hide the truth: their shrinking content library and your diminishing control. Spotify has abandoned its identity as a music lover’s sanctuary in favor of becoming a podcast-promoting engagement trap that serves shareholders, not listeners. These aren’t isolated incidents—they’re symptoms of a pandemic spreading across every digital platform we rely on.

This isn’t evolution. It’s enshittification.

Cory Doctorow coined this term to describe the predictable lifecycle of platforms: First, they’re good to users to attract them. Then, they’re bad to users but good to business customers to extract maximum value. Finally, they’re bad to everyone because they’ve exhausted all goodwill. We’re witnessing this exact pattern unfold across nearly every digital experience we use.

The Tyranny of the Marginal User

Every product has a natural ceiling. There’s a finite number of people who genuinely need what you’ve built. But Wall Street demands infinite growth, and VCs expect hockey stick curves, not plateaus. So what happens when you’ve saturated your core market?

You start chasing the marginal user, that hypothetical person who doesn’t really want your product but might be convinced to download it anyway. Call him Marl.

Marl doesn’t care about your carefully crafted features. He has no interest in learning keyboard shortcuts or mastering your tool’s capabilities. Marl’s attention span is measured in seconds, not minutes. His tolerance for complexity is zero. His thumb moves in a repetitive, zombie-like scrolling motion, and engagement is measured by how long you can delay his inevitable departure.

Yet increasingly, it’s Marl who drives product decisions, not the enthusiasts who championed your product, not the power users who pushed its boundaries, and certainly not the everyday users who relied on its core functionality. When product teams obsess over expanding to the margins rather than deepening value for the core, the result is inevitable: enshittification.

The Metrics Mirage

“What gets measured gets managed.” Peter Drucker’s insight has morphed into a monster. In today’s data-saturated product organizations, the true maxim is darker: “What can be easily measured will inevitably hijack what truly matters.”

Companies don’t set out to build terrible products. They set out to optimize metrics. They create dashboards with seductive green arrows pointing up and to the right. They celebrate when engagement increases by 0.2% week-over-week. They high-five when session duration stretches longer. Meanwhile, the actual human experience—the joy, utility, and satisfaction that brought users to the product in the first place—gets sacrificed on the altar of measurability.

Take Netflix. If their internal data shows that when their algorithmic recommendation engine fails and defaults to simple curated lists, streaming drops by 20%. To product leaders chasing metrics, this validates their personalization strategy. But dig deeper and you’ll find this actually promotes a perverse incentive structure: Netflix benefits when you spend more time browsing than watching. When they make it harder to find exactly what you want, your “engagement” paradoxically increases as you hunt endlessly through their catalog.

Spotify has the same issue, if metrics show that podcast listeners have higher retention rates and lifetime value than music-only users. The result? A relentless push toward podcasts, even for users who’ve never shown interest in them. The fact that this fundamentally betrays the product’s original purpose becomes irrelevant when the metrics look good in board presentations.

This is the metrics mirage—the illusion that improving numbers on a dashboard automatically translates to improving the product. It doesn’t. Often, it means exactly the opposite.

The Case for Faster Horses

Here’s the bitter truth: Sometimes users actually know what they want. And sometimes it’s just a faster version of what they already have.

When users beg for “the old version but better,” they’re not displaying a lack of imagination. They’re giving you incredibly valuable feedback about what they actually value in your product. The dismissive “faster horse” response isn’t visionary; it’s arrogance masquerading as insight.

Take Slack’s decision to replace markdown-style inline formatting with a WYSIWYG interface. The backlash was immediate and fierce. Users who had built muscle memory for formatting their messages with simple keystrokes suddenly had to contend with floating toolbars and hidden menus. Power users who could type asterisks to italicize without breaking their flow were now forced to move their hands from keyboard to mouse and back again. The “innovation” destroyed efficiency for the very people who used the product most intensively.

What’s revealing about this example is that users weren’t resistant to change itself. They were resistant to having their workflow disrupted by a solution to a problem they didn’t have. The original markdown formatting was already the “faster horse” they wanted: simple, efficient, and predictable. The WYSIWYG interface was the equivalent of replacing their horse with a fancy automobile that required constant maintenance and ran out of gas every few miles.

The “faster horse” quote also fundamentally misrepresents the historical reality. Transportation was evolving incrementally long before Ford’s assembly line, from better horse breeding to improved carriages to early automobiles. Ford’s innovation wasn’t imagining the car; it was making it accessible through mass production. Listening to what people wanted (affordable transportation) was precisely what made him successful.

When we dismiss user feedback as unimaginative, we’re not being visionary. We’re being lazy. We’re avoiding the hard work of understanding what users truly value, and instead chasing after shiny innovations regardless of whether they solve real problems.

Breaking the Cycle

The patterns of enshittification aren’t inevitable. They’re choices. And different choices can lead to different outcomes.

So how do we resist the gravitational pull toward mediocrity? How do we build products that evolve without losing their soul? More practically, how do we convince leadership that preserving what users love might actually be the best business strategy?

1. Focus on Jobs-to-Be-Done, Not Engagement

Clayton Christensen’s Jobs-to-Be-Done framework asks a simple question: What problem is your product actually solving for users? Netflix users don’t subscribe for an endless scroll experience. They want to find and enjoy great films and shows. Spotify users don’t open the app for podcast recommendations. They want to discover and organize music they love.

Slack users don’t pay for emoji reactions and app integrations. They adopted the platform to reduce email overload and improve team communication. Yet with each update, Slack seems more determined to become a “collaboration OS” than to perfect its core function. The result? Bloated interfaces, notification fatigue, and the paradoxical return to email for many teams seeking simplicity.

When product decisions align with the core problem users want solved, engagement follows naturally. When they don’t, you may see a short-term engagement boost at the cost of long-term user satisfaction.

This principle is even more critical in enterprise software, where users are captive audiences. They don’t choose your product. Their employer does. Enterprise platforms often optimize for metrics that delight the purchaser (license utilization, cross-sell opportunities, feature adoption) rather than metrics that reflect end-user satisfaction. When these platforms lose sight of their core purpose in pursuit of “platform expansion” or “executive dashboard metrics,” they’re not just annoying users. They’re actively harming workplace productivity and morale. The irony is that truly delighting end users would ultimately drive better business outcomes for everyone involved.

2. Embrace Power User Segmentation

The “average user” is a statistical fiction. Your users aren’t a monolith. They’re individuals with varying levels of engagement and sophistication. The most engaged 20% of your users often drive 80% of your word-of-mouth growth and defend your product against competitors.

Segment your power users and build for them first. Give them the tools they need to be even more successful with your product. Their enthusiasm will ripple outward, bringing in more users who aspire to become power users themselves.

Amazon didn’t build AWS for the average shopper. They built it for the most technically sophisticated segment of their user base. That segment has since grown into Amazon’s most profitable division.

3. Create Contextual Modes, Not One-Size-Fits-All

The fatal flaw in most product designs is assuming all users want the same experience. They don’t. Sometimes I use Spotify to discover new music, and sometimes I just want to play a specific album. Sometimes I use Netflix to find something new, and sometimes I just want to continue the show I was watching yesterday.

Great products recognize these different contexts and adapt accordingly. They don’t force a discovery experience when the user clearly knows what they want. They don’t hide the search function six scrolls down the page.

The Path to Sustainable Growth

The truly visionary act in product development isn’t chasing the latest trend or reshuffling your UI to boost short-term engagement. It’s having the clarity to understand what your users actually need and the discipline to deliver it consistently.

When we optimize for genuine user value instead of vanity metrics, something remarkable happens: the metrics that truly matter improve organically. Customer acquisition costs drop as word-of-mouth referrals increase. Churn decreases as users find consistent value. Lifetime value grows as loyalty deepens. The best product companies understand that long-term financial success flows from user satisfaction, not the other way around.

Much of this enshittification stems from a particular model of growth demanded by venture capital. The VC funding model requires hockey-stick growth curves and rapid scaling, forcing companies to expand beyond their natural audience. MBA-trained product leaders, incentivized by growth targets and quarterly OKRs, implement strategies that capture and monetize user attention rather than deliver lasting value. This approach treats users as resources to be mined rather than customers to be served.

But there may be another way forward. Perhaps the next generation of standout products will come from companies that reject this model. Companies that grow within their means, that aren’t forced to chase the marginal user. Companies that see profit in delighting existing users rather than in constantly acquiring new ones. Companies that measure success by customer satisfaction and retention, not by engagement metrics and growth percentages.

These companies might build the digital equivalent of faster horses. They might look more like refined versions of what came before than radical reinventions. But they’ll solve real problems for real people. They’ll respect their users enough to listen when they say exactly what they want, and deliver it without manipulation or dark patterns.

Because ultimately, the goal isn’t disruption for disruption’s sake. It’s creating tools that genuinely improve people’s lives. And perhaps that’s the innovation we need most: the recognition that sometimes the best step forward is perfecting what already works, not reinventing it.