New Paradigms in Independent Software Development

As software products mature and add features to meet new needs, they risk becoming bloated — the fix is rethinking information architecture, not just adding more configuration.

As successful software products grow, they tend to accumulate features to meet an expanding range of customer needs, until that flexibility starts working against them, making the product harder to use, update, and understand. This pattern is difficult to see coming but common in mature ISV products.

One instinct is to give users more configurability, but that often just shifts the complexity burden onto the user rather than solving it, and it can make an already crowded market even harder to differentiate in.

A Better Path Forward

A more durable answer combines a genuine focus on user experience, treating cloud infrastructure as a strategic lever rather than a commodity, and rethinking talent strategy to bring more cognitive diversity into product decisions.