vskwdas April 2025

Entropy in Product Design: Why Every System Wants to Fall Apart

In keeping with the theme of inevitable decay, your attention span may collapse before the end. A TL;DR has therefore been placed at the bottom,
like an emergency exit.

Left unattended, everything falls apart. Buildings crumble, gardens grow weeds, and filing cabinets (digital or otherwise) descend into chaos.
Products are no different. Entropy - the natural tendency toward disorder - is not just a law of physics; it is a law of product design.

What begins as a clean, elegant system inevitably drifts into clutter, confusion, and contradiction. This is not because designers are careless
or engineers incompetent. It is because entropy is relentless, and every feature, every workaround, every quick fix accelerates its advance.

The role of a product manager is not to defeat entropy — an impossible task — but to fight a noble holding action, slowing the decay long
enough for the product to remain useful and coherent.

The Pristine Beginning

All products begin life in a state of artificial purity. The first version is simple, almost ascetic. Gmail launched with search and labels,
nothing more. The iPod had a scroll wheel and a handful of buttons. Slack, in its early days, just let people message each other.

These products felt clean because they were. The absence of features created clarity. But this clarity is fragile. Growth brings demands,
demands bring features, and features bring entropy.

How Entropy Creeps In :-

Entropy rarely arrives dramatically. It sneaks in through the side door

  • The Quick Fix : We will just add toggle in the settings.

  • The One - Off Exception : This client really needs a custom flow

  • The Harmless Addition : Let's throw in this extra button - It won'r hurt.

Each decision makes sense in isolation. None of them is fatal. But together,
they accumulate into clutter. Settings menus expand into labyrinths.
Onboarding flows become sagas.
The once-pristine product starts to feel like an attic filled with forgotten furniture.


The Law of Legacy

Entropy accelerates with age. Every product carries the baggage of its past. Old code lingers because nobody dares to touch it.
Legacy features remain because a handful of loyal users might riot if they disappear. Every year adds another layer of sediment,
compacting into a geological record of compromises.

The result is often absurd. Users encounter three ways to accomplish the same task because nobody had the courage to remove
the first two. Documentation refers to features that technically still exist but are best left undisturbed, like ruins in a forest.

The cost of Complexity

Entropy is not just an aesthetic problem. It imposes real costs:.

  • Cognitive Load : Users struggle to navigate bloated interfaces.

  • Engineering Drag : Every new feature takes longer to build, tangled in dependencies.

  • Bug Multiplication : Complexity increases the probability of things breaking in unexpected ways.

Eventually, entropy becomes self-reinforcing. Teams spend so much time maintaining complexity that they cannot reduce it,
which only creates more complexity. This is the product equivalent of quicksand.

The Illusion of Control

PM's often comfort themselves with roadmaps, design systems, and documentation. These tools are valuable, but they are not control.
At best, they delay entropy’s advance. At worst, they create the illusion that entropy has been tamed while it continues to creep
through the cracks.

The hard truth is that entropy cannot be eliminated. It can only be managed, like weeds in a garden. Stop tending,
and chaos reclaims the space.

Strategies Against Entropy

  1. Prune Ruthlessly - Every feature should prove its worth or face removal. Sunsetting is painful but necessary.

  2. Beware of the toggle - Settings are entropy’s favourite hiding place. Every toggle is a future burden.

  3. Audit Regularly - Schedule time not just for new features, but for reviewing what should be simplified or removed.

  4. Design for Defaults - Strong defaults reduce the proliferation of edge cases.

  5. Champion Simplicity - Resist the cultural pressure to equate activity with value.


The Heroism of Maintenance

There is little glory in maintenance. Stakeholders cheer new launches, not bug fixes. Engineers want to build new systems, not refactor
old ones. Yet the unglamorous work of maintenance is the only thing keeping entropy from consuming the product entirely.

A PM who celebrates maintenance as strategy, rather than treating it as a chore, will preserve more product value than the one who
relentlessly chases new features.


Entropy as Honesty

Perhaps the most humbling lesson of entropy is that it reminds us of limits. No system remains perfect. No roadmap survives contact
with reality. Every design eventually frays.

Accepting entropy is not defeatism. It is honesty. The PM’s job is not to freeze the product in purity but to manage its decline gracefully,
to ensure that even as complexity accumulates, coherence endures.


Fighting the Inevitable

Entropy cannot be defeated. But it can be resisted. The PM’s task is to recognise its presence, to prune relentlessly, and to defend clarity
against the creeping tide of clutter.

If this feels unheroic, that’s because it is. The battle against entropy is not dramatic. It is a slow grind, a series of small decisions
to keep things simple when everyone else clamors for more.

And yet, it is precisely this unglamorous fight that separates enduring products from bloated ones. The greatest compliment a user
can give is not “this product has everything,” but “this product just works.”


TLDR -

Left alone, products collapse into clutter. Every toggle, every “quick fix,” every legacy feature is another brick in the wall of chaos.
PMs can’t defeat entropy, but they can prune it — much like gardeners, except less admired.