Smart Product Teams Keep Their Options Open — Here’s How
Some teams build like they’ll never have to touch the system again. They charge ahead, hardcoding workflows, locking in decisions, and treating every feature like it’s the final word on the problem. It’s clean. It’s efficient. And it’s a nightmare six months later when reality demands something different.
There’s a term for this in the product community: Solution Myopia. It’s what happens when teams focus so much on delivering a solution that they forget to consider the right solution — or whether they might need multiple solutions over time.
Engineers also have a phrase for this: “The future you will hate you.” They know what happens when teams prioritise short-term velocity over long-term adaptability. They’re the ones who will be rewriting entire systems later because no one stopped to ask:
- What happens if we need to change this?
- Are we baking in assumptions we might regret?
- Are there future directions we might want that we are engineering out by doing this now?
- How painful will iteration be later?
Too many teams don’t ask these four questions until it’s too late. And when they finally do, they realise they’ve built a brittle, inflexible system that actively resists change and all but stalls further progress.
The good news? You can avoid falling into this trap. Smart cross-functional teams know how to ship quickly without closing doors they might need to walk through later. In this post, we are going to talk about how.
Why Do Product Teams Do This?
No one intends to paint themselves into a corner. No product manager wakes up thinking, Let’s make future development as painful as possible. But it happens — a lot. Why is that?
Because product teams and their stakeholders love certainty — it feels good.
When you lock in a solution, it gives the illusion of control. You can create a neat, structured roadmap. You can promise stakeholders exactly what will be built and in what order (you might even make a claim to “when” it will be done) – it’s easy to sprint toward a well-defined, static goal.
But there is a problem — reality doesn’t care about your roadmap.
Let’s take a look at some of the common mistakes that create this problem:
- False certainty feels like progress — “We know what we’re building.” Do you? Or do you know what made sense before you started learning new things AFTER you started? Premature decisions give a comforting sense of momentum — but at the cost of future flexibility.
- Fear of ‘scope creep’ kills healthy flexibility — Some teams interpret keeping options open as not making decisions. So they overcorrect — locking everything down to “avoid scope creep” rather than recognising that not all change is bad.
- Commitment for commitment’s sake — Some leaders pride themselves on never changing course, treating commitment as a virtue in itself. It’s framed as grit and determination, but it’s really just fear of looking indecisive. They’d rather be consistently wrong than strategically flexible. Instead of asking, Is this still the right path?, they double down — citing past decisions as if early certainty deserves more weight than new information.
- Lack of engineering input early on — Product managers dictate features, and engineers scramble to implement them. There is no Product Trio at work here. No one stops to ask, ‘Is this the best way to approach the problem?’ Result: A brittle system no one wants (dares?) to touch.
- Short-term pressure wins over long-term thinking — “We just need to ship this now — we can clean it up later!” (Narrator: and yet, nothing gets cleaned up later.)
- Business incentives reward the wrong things — Executives love clear timelines, concrete deliverables, and certainty. So teams optimise for predictability over adaptability — even when they should optimise for learning.
So, where does that leave us? Almost inevitably, when the market shifts, customer needs evolve, or leadership pivots, the team is left scrambling to respond, and all the while, the beautifully rigid system your team has built is fighting against you.
The irony? The teams that fear rework the most — the ones who rush to ‘lock things in’ — are the ones who end up doing the most rework.
“The chief cause of problems is solutions.” — Eric Sevareid
The Cost of Premature Commitment
When product teams lock in a solution too early, it doesn’t just slow them down — it actively makes the work harder. Every decision you make today that ignores future needs is a debt that someone — probably an engineer, who’s likely cursing your very existance — will have to pay back later.
The costs soon pile up…
Tech Debt That Isn’t Just Technical
It’s easy to think of tech debt as an engineering problem, but premature commitment creates product, design and experience debt, too. Every rigid decision you bake into your system limits your ability to experiment, iterate, and respond to feedback and changes later.
Expensive Rewrites Instead Of Cheap Iterations
When you assume the first version of a feature is the final version, you leave yourself only one option: rip-and-replace. Future-you won’t be iterating; you’ll be unpicking a mess that should have never been that tightly coupled in the first place.
Lost Opportunities You Never See Coming
The best product ideas often emerge from real-world usage, not upfront planning. But when your system can’t flex, you don’t just struggle to respond — you never even consider the possibility of responding. You’re not just slow; you’re blind to other exciting potential opportunities.
A Growing Backlog Of ‘We Should Have Thought Of That’
Every assumption that turns out wrong adds another ticket to your “options” backlog. Eventually, that list isn’t just things you need to build — it’s things you will need to unbuild before you can build the things you really need to. That’s the moment when everyone realises they’ve made a huge, never mind costly, mistake.
Engineering Fatigue That Kills Momentum
Engineers don’t hate change. They hate bad change — a change that should have been obvious but wasn’t considered, such was the rush to race ahead.
At its core, we know that motivation comes from mastery, autonomy, and purpose (hat tip to Daniel Pink):
- Mastery — Engineers want to build great systems, not spend their days duct-taping over past mistakes.
- Autonomy — They want the space to make good decisions, not just execute on rigid, pre-ordained plans.
- Purpose — They want to solve meaningful problems, not endlessly rework things just because the team failed to think ahead.
But when leadership prioritises certainty over adaptability, it kills all three. Engineers lose mastery because they’re constantly working against a broken system. They lose autonomy because decisions were locked in before they had a say. And they lose purpose because instead of solving real problems, they’re just undoing avoidable mistakes.
The result? They disengage. They stop thinking long-term. They stop caring. And when your best engineers start doing the bare minimum, you’re not just losing momentum — you’re losing your best builders, your biggest thinkers, and your ability to innovate at all.
And Another Thing
The worst part? The more rigid the system, the more painful every new request becomes. It’s not just wasted effort — it’s compounded inefficiency.
And for what? A fleeting sense of certainty? A roadmap that felt good in a slide deck? It’s not worth it.
A Better Way: Engineering with Optionality
Smart teams don’t build for just today. They don’t fall into the trap of gold plating every possible future — but they also don’t design themselves into a dead end either. They leave doors ajar.
This isn’t about making everything endlessly flexible or over-complicating solutions “just in case.” It’s about engineering with optionality — making decisions that are easy to adjust when and not if things change.
Here’s how to do it:
- Make Reversible Decisions — Some decisions are one-way doors — you go through, and there’s no going back without massive cost. Others are two-way doors — low-risk, easily changeable. Good teams know the difference. Think of it like pouring milk into tea. Once it’s mixed, there’s no way to undo it — you’d waste more time trying to separate it than just making a fresh cup. Some product decisions are like that: once made, they’re irreversible, and fixing them later is a slow, painful mess. Before locking something in, ask: If we’re wrong, how hard will this be to undo? If the answer is “as difficult as separating milk from tea”, you’d better be damn sure it’s the right choice.
- Think in Modules, Not Monoliths — The more tangled your system, the harder it is to change anything without breaking everything. Modular architectures, clear separation of concerns, and well-defined interfaces make it easier to evolve individual parts without a full rewrite.
- Version Instead of Replacing — Killing a feature and replacing it from scratch sounds bold, but it’s often unnecessary. Instead, version your approach. Keep the old path open while experimenting with the new. Let reality tell you when it’s time to fully commit.
- “Just Enough” Abstraction — There’s a difference between smart abstraction and abstracting everything into oblivion. Good teams don’t create unnecessary complexity. They ask: Where might we need flexibility? Then they add just enough structure to keep their options open.
- Stop Treating the Roadmap Like a Contract — Roadmaps should be hypotheses, not promises. When product teams understand that their roadmap is their best-guess based on what they knew then— not an irrefutable truth — they naturally make better choices about what to commit to now vs. what to keep open-ended.
- Regular Product-Engineering Alignment — If product and engineering aren’t making decisions together, expect friction. Engineering needs visibility into upcoming product plans to build wisely, and product needs to understand what’s easy, what’s hard, and what’s costly to change later.
None of this means delaying decisions indefinitely. It means being deliberate about which doors you close and which ones you leave ajar.
Because the best teams know that certainty is an illusion and adaptability is a choice.
Examples: Teams That Got It Right (or Wrong!)
The best way to understand the right and wrong ways to approach this is to explore some real-world examples.
Hammer House Of Horror: The Case of the Hardcoded Workflow
A mid-sized SaaS company was rolling out a new onboarding flow for enterprise customers. The product team, eager to launch fast, hardcoded every step into the UI. Every workflow was fixed in place, tied directly to the database schema and front-end logic.
It worked — until the first enterprise client asked for a minor tweak.
That minor tweak required rewriting the entire flow, because instead of designing the system to allow change through configuration, they had built it as one rigid, immovable process.
What should have been as simple as toggle a setting turned into a full-blown engineering project. As more clients requested changes, the team were required to hack through more and more previous decisions. Six months later, the onboarding flow was the most hated part of the system, with teams afraid to touch it.
Eventually, leadership were forced to greenlight a complete rebuild — not because the workflow itself was wrong, but because they had no choice – they had boxed themselves in. The worst part, of course, is that they could have avoided all of it by leaving just a little flexibility in the system from the start.
The Sherlock Holmes of Systems: The Team That Built for Change
Compare that to a payments startup that took a different approach.
Instead of assuming they knew exactly how payment flows would evolve, they built their system around events and configurable rather than rigid workflows.
- Instead of hardcoding transaction rules, they created a rules engine that could be adjusted without redeploying code.
- Instead of defining payment flows in fixed logic, they used state machines to allow flexible transitions.
- Instead of locking in a single provider, they designed the system to be hot-swappable for multiple payment gateways from the start.
The result? When the business needed to launch in a new market with different regulations, they didn’t have to rip everything apart. They just tweaked some settings, updated a few rules, and shipped the change in days, not months.
They didn’t over-engineer an overly complex system ‘just in case’ — they simply left themselves options. Like a good detective, they knew that what seemed novel today would be routine tomorrow. And when yesterday’s ‘delighter’ requirements inevitably became today’s ‘basic expectations,’ they didn’t panic or scramble — they just adjusted course, because they had built with change in mind.
The Takeaway
Which one do you want to be?
- The first team assumed they’d never need to change anything — so they locked in early and paid the price.
- The second team knew change was inevitable — so they made decisions that allowed them to adapt without rebuilding from scratch.
- One team designed for what they thought they knew.
- The other team designed for what they didn’t know yet.
Conclusion: The Future You Will Thank You
The choices your team makes today will either set you up for speed and adaptability — or lock you into pain and regret. The difference isn’t in how much you build. It’s in how much you assume.
The teams that suffer the most are the ones that think they have all the answers too soon. They hardcode workflows, lock in assumptions, and treat roadmaps like destiny. They optimise for certainty over adaptability — and then, six months later, they realise they were wrong.
The best teams don’t fall into that trap. They don’t over-engineer, but they also don’t design themselves into a dead end. They leave doors open. They make reversible decisions whenever possible, build just enough flexibility, and accept that change isn’t an edge case — it’s the whole game.
If you’re building something today, ask yourself:
- Will this decision cost us more later if we need to change it?
- Are we baking in assumptions we don’t need to?
- What’s the simplest way to keep our options open without over-complicating things?
Because six months from now, the market will shift. Customers will ask for things you didn’t predict. Leadership will pivot. And when that happens, the future you will either thank you — or hate you.
“In times of change, the greatest danger is to act with yesterday’s logic.” — Peter Drucker
The future is coming — faster than you think. Are you building in a way that keeps doors open?
About Me
I’m Paul, a Partner at Thrivve Partners and a Product & Flow Practitioner, focused on data-informed, evidence-led ways of working. As a ProKanban trainer, I help teams and organisations navigate complexity, optimise flow, and deliver value — without getting trapped in rigid frameworks. I believe in leading with curiosity, not judgment — helping teams uncover better ways of working through exploration, learning, and continuous improvement.
