You’re not a strategic designer if you’ve never killed your own feature idea

Three weeks. That’s how long I spent designing a dashboard feature early in my career. Solid layouts. Stakeholders approved it. Everyone was happy.

Then I ran concept testing and looked at the data.

2% of users would benefit. Everyone else got more cognitive load, a messier onboarding, and a maintenance burden nobody asked for.

So I killed it.

My PM was genuinely confused.

“But everyone approved it.”

Sure, because nobody wants to be the one who says no.

I’ve watched designers spend months perfecting features that shouldn’t even exist. The work was beautiful. The problem didn’t matter.

They shipped it anyway because killing your own work feels like losing.

But, it’s not losing. It is the whole product design job.

If everything you design makes it to production, that’s not really a win. That’s a sign you’re executing requests instead of making decisions. You’ve got Figma skills and a PM’s to-do list.

Strategy isn’t about just making things.

It’s knowing which things shouldn’t exist at all, including the ones you made.

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