Friction as revaluation
Why the friction your team keeps removing is the thing your customers came for.
Every product team has a backlog of friction to remove. The form is too long, the steps are too many, the language is too dense. Smooth it. Speed it up. Reduce it to a tap.
Sometimes that is the right call. Often it is not.
The friction in a process is rarely incidental. It is the part that signals care, demands intention, or filters for a kind of customer the product was actually built for. Remove it, and the product still works, but it becomes the thing it always was structurally without being the thing people were paying to belong to.
Consider what happens when a tailor introduces an instant order flow. The clothes still fit. The shipping still arrives. But the relationship is different now. The fitting was not a step on the way to the suit. The fitting was the suit. The cloth was the receipt.
The same is true at the level of software. A note-taking app that asks you to slow down before you write is not friction-laden, it is honest about what writing is. A community that requires a small act of work to enter is not gatekeeping, it is preserving the texture that made it worth entering at all.
The reflex to remove friction is downstream of a more interesting question, which is what the friction was protecting. If the answer is nothing, fine, remove it. If the answer is the very thing the customer came for, you are not improving the product. You are revaluing it.
Most teams never ask the question. The friction goes, the product feels faster, and a year later nobody can quite remember why they used to care.