Reducing Toil: The Best Features in Existing Products Aren't Always New Ones

Why eliminating friction often delivers more value than adding functionality

May 13, 2025

"The best product managers are good editors. Taking features away and making them simple is often better than adding new ones." — Marty Cagan

When taking over an existing product, the pressure to add new features can be overwhelming. Sales teams request competitive capabilities, executives want market-differentiating innovations, and your backlog overflows with enhancement ideas. Yet in today's product development landscape, the most valuable improvements often aren't new features at all — they're reductions in toil for your users.

🔄 What is Toil and Why Does It Matter?

Toil represents the friction, inefficiency, and frustration that users experience when trying to accomplish tasks with your product. It's the extra clicks, the confusing workflows, the repetitive data entry, and the mental effort required to use your solution effectively.

Unlike new features that might benefit a subset of users, reducing toil improves the experience for everyone who already uses your product. It's the difference between adding a new room to a house versus fixing the squeaky door that everyone uses daily.

🧠 The Cognitive Cost of Complex Products

Each feature added to your product increases its cognitive load — the mental effort required to understand and use it. As Google's former design ethicist Tristan Harris notes, "Your attention is a finite resource." When products demand too much attention, users experience:

😫 Decision fatigue from too many options
🤔 Confusion about how to accomplish basic tasks
⏱️ Time wasted navigating unnecessary complexity

Reducing toil gives your users back their most precious resource: their attention and time.

📊 Measuring the ROI of Friction Reduction

Toil reduction is often treated as unmeasurable "quality work," but successful product managers establish concrete metrics to prove its value:

The Toil Reduction Balance Sheet

When Intercom eliminated steps in their chat widget implementation, they saw a 30% increase in successful installations and a 47% decrease in support tickets—delivering more measurable value than their previous three feature releases combined.

This isn't just maintenance work—it's high-ROI product development that directly impacts revenue and growth metrics.

💼 Case Study: Toil Reduction as Competitive Advantage

Superhuman's Email Revolution

Email client Superhuman demonstrates the power of toil reduction as a primary product strategy. While competitors focused on adding features, Superhuman obsessively targeted friction in the core email experience:

They engineered sub-100ms performance for every interaction, recognizing that tiny delays compound into major frustration
They invested heavily in keyboard shortcuts that eliminate mouse movement
They created intelligent automation for repetitive tasks like follow-ups and sorting

The result? According to Superhuman's own reporting, their customers "fly through their inbox twice as fast" and "save an average of three hours per week on email." Teams using Superhuman reportedly "spend 50% less time in their inbox" and "reply to 2x the number of emails."

Despite charging $30/month in a market filled with free alternatives, Superhuman has built a devoted following by focusing relentlessly on reducing friction in a core workflow that knowledge workers perform daily.

This approach transformed what could have been viewed as "maintenance work" into their core value proposition and primary revenue driver.

🤖 Leveraging AI to Identify and Reduce Toil

AI is transforming how we identify and address friction points in existing products. Modern AI can:

Analyse user sessions to identify where people get stuck or abandon tasks
Process support conversations to uncover patterns in user confusion
Generate intelligent defaults that reduce decision-making burden
Automate repetitive tasks that previously required manual intervention

The most valuable AI features often aren't flashy new capabilities, but instead work quietly in the background to make existing workflows smoother and more intuitive.

🔍 The Friction Audit: Beyond Surface-Level Signals

Traditional methods of identifying pain points often miss the most insidious forms of toil. Rather than relying solely on obvious signals, conduct a comprehensive Friction Audit:

The DEEP Method for Finding Hidden Toil

Document the complete user journey, including "between" moments
- Map every click, decision point, and waiting period
- Record time spent on each step across different user segments
Examine support interactions qualitatively
- Look for emotional language ("frustrated," "confused," "wasted time")
- Identify where users apologize for "simple questions" (a sign of poor design)
Expose shadow processes
- Interview customers about how they track work outside your product
- Identify spreadsheets, notes, or other tools they use alongside your solution
Prioritize using the Time-Frequency-Impact matrix
- Time: How long does the friction point delay the user?
- Frequency: How often do users encounter this friction?
- Impact: How critical is this step to the overall workflow?

Multiply these factors to calculate each friction point's burden score. This quantitative approach helps you make the business case for toil reduction over new feature development.

🛠️ The SMOOTH Toil Reduction Playbook

Successful toil reduction follows a systematic approach. Apply these six tactics to transform friction into flow:

1. Simplify Before Adding

Before considering new functionality, ask: "Can we make existing features more intuitive?" One e-commerce platform simplified their checkout process from 22 steps to 13, reportedly increasing conversion by 30%.

2. Measure Interaction Costs

Quantify the "interaction cost" of key user journeys in terms of time, clicks, and cognitive load. A leading navigation app reduced the steps to start navigation from four to one, resulting in a measured usage increase of approximately 35%.

3. Observe and Eliminate Wait States

Identify where users are forced to wait—for pages to load, processes to complete, or systems to respond. One popular social media platform's performance optimization reportedly reduced bounce rates by 40% when they halved loading times.

4. Offer Intelligent Memory

Make your product remember what users do, so they don't have to. A major music streaming service implemented a "continue listening" feature that eliminates the need to search for recent content, increasing daily active usage.

5. Transform Required Into Automatic

Convert manual actions into automatic ones where possible. An electronic signature platform automated field recognition in common documents, and reported completion rates rising by approximately 25%.

6. Harmonize the Ecosystem

Ensure consistent patterns across your product so users can apply knowledge from one area to another. A well-known productivity tool implemented a unified blocks system that significantly reduced the learning curve for different content types.

⚖️ The Toil Reduction Framework: VALUE

Instead of using traditional resource allocation models, consider applying the VALUE framework to prioritize your toil reduction efforts:

Visibility: Make invisible friction visible through metrics and user feedback
Acknowledge: Recognize the full cost of complexity in your product
Leverage: Focus on high-impact improvements that affect most users
Unify: Connect fragmented workflows into coherent experiences
Evaluate: Measure improvements in time saved and satisfaction gained

This approach transforms toil reduction from a maintenance activity to a strategic advantage. For each potential improvement, assess its VALUE score to determine where your efforts will deliver the greatest returns.

🌱 Conclusion: From Maintenance to Masterpiece

When Blaise Pascal famously apologized, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time," he captured the essence of what makes toil reduction so challenging—and so valuable. Thoughtful simplification requires more creativity and discipline than feature expansion.

For product managers inheriting established products, the path to differentiation often isn't through adding what competitors have, but through eliminating what everyone (including competitors) has accepted as necessary friction.

The most beloved products in the world—from Apple devices to Stripe payments to Tesla interfaces—didn't win through feature abundance. They won by making essential tasks feel effortless.

As you evaluate your roadmap, remember that your users' most precious resource isn't money—it's attention and time. The product that respects these resources by reducing toil will earn not just usage, but lasting loyalty and advocacy.