The Feature Creep

Beta Stories — Episode 07 Notion launched in 2016 as a note-taking app with a clever block-based editor. By 2018, it had databases and project management. By 2023, AI. By 2024, a calendar. By 2025, an email client. 180 feature updates shipped in 2024 alone. The desktop app, an Electron wrapper, consumes 200 MB on disk. A note-taking app that now sends your email and manages your calendar. One does wonder when it will offer dental insurance. This is the industry's favourite disease. And it has two symptoms that appear contradictory but share the same root cause. Symptom One: Adding What Nobody Asked For Jira was created in 2002 by two engineers in Sydney with a $10,000 credit card. A bug tracker. Simple, effective, named after Godzilla. Twenty-four years later, it serves Software Teams, DevOps, Product Managers, IT, HR, and Marketing through 3,000 marketplace plugins. Teams reportedly spend more time configuring their workflow tool than doing the work it tracks. Linear, which explicitly