Okay, so let me tell you about this thing I tried, kinda based on how I heard this guy, Nick Savage, approaches stuff. Not sure if he’s even real, maybe just a name someone threw around, but the idea stuck with me.
We had this project, right? And it was turning into a real mess. Scope creep everywhere, deadlines looking like a joke. Everyone wanted their little piece added, their special feature. Standard stuff, happens all the time. But this time it felt like we were sinking fast.
I remembered hearing about this ‘Savage’ approach – basically, stop being nice. Just cut, cut, cut until you only have the absolute bare minimum that works. Not the minimum viable product everyone talks about, more like the minimum surviving product. Sounds rough, I know.
So, I decided to give it a shot. Pulled the main folks into a room. Put everything, and I mean everything, we planned to build up on the board. Every feature, every button, every little animation someone thought was cool.
Then came the hard part. I went through item by item. Asked the room, “If this isn’t there on launch day, does the whole thing just stop working? Like, totally useless?” Not “is it nice,” not “does it make it better,” but “will it literally break without it?”
Man, people did not like that. Lots of defending their ideas. “But users expect this!” “But it won’t look professional without that!” Heard it all. I had to be pretty blunt. Just kept asking the same question. If the answer wasn’t a clear “Yes, it breaks,” it got a big red line through it. We argued, sure. Felt like a bad guy for a bit.
We chopped out fancy onboarding tutorials. Gone. Replaced with a simple text file link. We axed the detailed user profile customization. Gone. Just username and password needed to work. That slick admin dashboard with all the graphs? Gone. Basic tables would have to do for now.
Honestly, by the end, the board looked pretty sad. Most of the cool stuff was gone. What was left was… basic. Super basic. But it was a list we could actually build in the time we had left.
We focused like crazy on just those core things. Got our heads down. Ignored all the noise about the features we cut. And you know what? We actually shipped something. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t going to win any design awards. But it did the one or two essential things it needed to do. It worked.
Later on, yeah, we added some of the other stuff back. When things calmed down. But that “Nick Savage” moment, that brutal chopping block session? It probably saved the project. It’s not a way to live everyday, definitely not. You burn people out being that harsh all the time. But when the ship’s sinking? Sometimes you gotta be savage and throw the fancy cargo overboard just to stay afloat.