“The bottleneck is the capacity of a human brain to absorb the most valuable parts of your product experience. As your product gets more bloated and complex sure absolute value goes up but the noise and complexity also goes up which means your value to noise ratio may drastically decline.”

Value-to-noise ratio: the human brain is the bottleneck — prune features to let the best ones breathe

Shipping fast is table stakes in the AI era, but Phil Carter warns that unchecked feature growth destroys the value-to-noise ratio. Adding features competes for the same cognitive bandwidth users have to absorb what makes the product valuable. His prescription: continuously analyze feature engagement and its correlation with long-term subscriber retention, then ruthlessly prune anything not contributing — keeping hero features loud and clear rather than buried under clutter.