The compound interest of design: what not to build

Editor’s note: This is Dave Snyder’s first opinion piece for Design Juice. Be sure to read to the end.

I’ve been designing digital products for 25 years. I remember when the big decision was going from 800×600 to 1024 pixels. I’ve lived through multiple cycles of VR hype, watched the web go from static pages to social networks to AI everything. I’ve launched products that failed spectacularly and others that succeeded for reasons no one predicted. 

Trees don’t pay off tomorrow. They pay off in a decade. They compound quietly, making everything around them better, shade, value, beauty, longevity. Most products? We treat them like shrubs. Plant twenty features, hope one sticks. Feature bloat dressed up as “innovation.” It’s impatient, and it’s stupid.

The smarter play is restraint. Plant the tree. Solve the one core problem. Put the craft in. Then let time and real user behavior do the work.

Take Shopify’s Shop app. When it launched seven years ago, it wasn’t trying to be everything to everyone. It solved one problem really well: package tracking. That was the tree. But because they resisted the urge to immediately add payments, social features, or whatever else was trendy, they could focus on making that core experience exceptional. The branches grew naturally, first the Shop button at checkout, then personalized recommendations, eventually a full marketplace. Each addition built on the strength of that original foundation.

Or look at something as small as Duolingo’s pull-to-refresh interaction. Instead of cramming more features into their language learning app, they invested craft in a micro-interaction that most teams would treat as an afterthought. That little moment of delight compounds into personality, habit formation, and user retention in ways that ten new features never could.

The hardest part isn’t identifying what to build, it’s identifying what not to build. At Slice, the pizza delivery app, we constantly faced pressure to expand beyond pizza. What about Chinese food? Burritos? Every restaurant type felt like an obvious opportunity. But staying laser-focused on pizza allowed us to optimize for things that mattered to pizza lovers: easy reordering of your usual slice, toppings that actually made sense, photography that showed what pizza actually looks like. We could build features like “reorder your last three orders” because we understood that pizza customers have routines, not because we were trying to serve everyone.

This is design as compound interest, not just the financial kind, but the human kind. Good foundational choices create returns that multiply over time. They generate the kind of interest that keeps users coming back, digging deeper, telling friends.

Most teams think compound interest means building features that stack on top of each other. But I’ve learned it actually means investing in the foundational details that make users want to return. The pull-to-refresh that makes you smile. The reorder flow that just works. The photography that actually helps you decide.

Every guess you make upfront is a liability. Every deliberate act of restraint is an investment. The things that matter take time, which is exactly why nobody wants to invest in them. But twenty-five years of watching products succeed and fail has taught me this: don’t be clever, don’t be greedy. Pick the thing that matters, do it well, and let evolution beat prediction.

Plant the fucking tree.