Decide For Me, Then Let Me Show Off

In-N-Out sells four things. A burger, a cheeseburger, fries, a shake. That is the whole board, lit up in red, and it has barely moved in seventy years. Then you lean in and order a Double Double, Animal Style, and the kid at the register nods like you just gave the password to a club he wasn’t sure you knew about.

You didn’t get more burger than the menu admitted exists. The receipt looks the same. But something happened anyway. You feel like you got away with something, and that feeling never shows up in the price, and it is doing more work than the burger.

That is a knob. Not the kind in a settings panel, the kind that lets a person reach past the default and feel rich for having reached. The secret menu isn’t sloppy menu design. It’s the most generous thing on the wall, precisely because it isn’t on the wall.

Now go the other direction.

Elden Ring ships with one difficulty. No easy mode, no slider, no story mode for people who just want to see the castles. Players have begged for years. The studio keeps saying no, and they are not being stubborn for sport. The brutal default is the product. The whole thing they are selling is the moment a wall you could not pass for a week finally falls, and a knob that let you turn the wall down would quietly delete the thing you came for. Here the value lives in the default, and a setting would water it down.

Then there’s the quiet middle. A Nest thermostat decides the temperature for you. It learns your week and runs it without asking. You can still spin the ring on the wall, and you almost never do, and that is the point. The knob there is not surplus and it is not strategy. It is reassurance. It exists so you feel like you could grab the wheel, even while the car drives itself just fine.

Three products, three different answers to the same question: where does the value actually live?

Here’s a rule I carry… A good default should make you feel safe. A good knob should make you feel rich.

Anything that does neither is clutter wearing a costume… and most software is wearing a lot of costumes.

This is where product leaders get lost, usually in one of two directions.

One ships fourteen toggles and calls it flexibility. It isn’t flexibility. It’s indecision with a lanyard. Every setting is a small confession that the team could not agree on what the thing should be, so they shipped the argument and made you referee it. Notion does this with a straight face. It hands you a blank page and a thousand options and calls the blank page freedom, and a stunning number of people open it, feel the weight of having to design their own product before they can use it, and quietly close the tab. Freedom that heavy is just homework.

The other leader ships zero knobs and calls it focus. Sometimes that is Elden Ring and it is glorious. More often it just caps how much delight a curious person is allowed to find, then calls the ceiling a philosophy. I think of a Prius here. Or there’s Linear, which sits in the honest middle. It decided what your workflow should be, shipped that opinion as the default, and rationed its settings like they cost money. You feel held by it instead of handed a kit.

And then there is the person whose whole job is to explain the thing, standing on a stage saying the core value is speed, or the core value is collaboration, treating the secret menu as a footnote. They are describing the engine and skipping the part that actually thrilled anyone. The customer did not fall in love with the core value. They fell in love with the Tuesday they found the shortcut nobody told them about and felt, for one minute, like the smartest person in the building.

Deciding for people is not a power grab. It is a kindness.

When you pick a brave default, you carry the weight of a decision so the other person doesn’t have to. You looked at the wall of choices, you ate the risk, you said this one, trust me. And then, if you are good, you leave a secret menu behind. A little room to reach past you and feel like the clever one.

That is the whole move. Decide so they feel safe. Then hide something so they feel rich. The cowardly product does neither, and you can feel it the second you open it, all those settings and not one of them a gift.

(To this day, I think “sport mode” in vehicles is one of the most genius product additions. What could be more attractive (and oxymoronic) than a knob that moderates your inherent desire for “more”? The not so secret dial that can even make a Prius feel more than a Prius.)

Stay Positive & Build It Animal Style