Why In-N-Out Burger Knows More About Your Product Strategy Than You Do
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Stop Adding Features. Start Adding Trust
Your team is exhausted from building features that aren't moving the needle. Your sales cycle keeps getting longer. And somewhere, right now, a prospect is building a spreadsheet comparing your features to every competitor in the market.
Here's what nobody in business is willing to admit: Building more features won't fix your sales problem.
Walk into any Trader Joe's and you'll notice something strange. While Whole Foods stocks 40 different olive oils, Trader Joe's offers just six. While competitors crowd their shelves with endless options, Trader Joe's deliberately carries fewer items than almost any major grocery chain.
By conventional wisdom, they should be failing. Instead, they generate more revenue per square foot than any grocery retailer in America.
In the next few minutes, I'm going to break down:
Why adding features is killing your sales velocity
How to recognize when trust, not features, is the real problem
The hidden psychology behind feature requests
A practical framework for building trust into your sales process
But first, you need to understand something crucial about why we're all addicted to building more features.
The Feature Trap
Your brain has been programmed by years of business thinking to believe a dangerous lie: that more features equals more value.
This mental model worked in the early days. When customers needed something, you added it. When they encountered a problem, you solved it with more options.
But something shifted in the last decade. Choice became overwhelming. Decision fatigue set in. And suddenly, having more options started working against you.
The Hidden Math of Feature Bloat
Here's what the data tells us:
The average product contains 75% more features than customers actually use. Think about that. Three-quarters of what we're building sits idle.
Teams spend up to 60% of their time maintaining capabilities that less than 20% of customers ever touch. That's more than half your resources spent on features almost no one uses.
Most damning of all, companies that prioritize feature parity over customer trust see 3x higher churn rates.
The Trust Gap Hidden in Feature Requests
When customers tell you they need more features, they're often expressing something deeper.
"We need more options" really means "We need to trust that you have the right option for us."
"Can you add this capability?" translates to "Can we trust that you'll solve our problem?"
"What other choices do you have?" is really asking "Can we trust that you understand what we need?"
Your missing features aren't causing slow sales. Missing trust is.
When Less Drives More
Think about the last time you were overwhelmed by choice. Maybe it was a restaurant with a 20-page menu. Or a store with so many options you left empty-handed. Or a product with so many settings you couldn't find what you needed.
Now think about the brands you trust most. I bet they offer fewer choices, not more.
The Counter-Intuitive Math
Take In-N-Out Burger. While competitors roll out new menu items monthly, they've barely changed their menu since 1948. Their offerings could fit on a Post-it note.
The result? $1.1 billion in revenue last year. Higher customer loyalty than any fast-food chain in America. Lines around the block at every location.
Or look at Costco. While typical supermarkets stock 40,000 items, Costco carries just 4,000. Each category might have two or three options at most.
The result? The highest customer retention rate in retail. A staggering 91% of customers renew their memberships every year.
The Hidden Cost of Choice
Here's what these market leaders understand: Every new option you add creates three hidden costs:
Decision Fatigue When you offer too many choices, customers don't make better decisions. They make no decision at all.
Confidence Erosion More options often make customers less confident in their final choice. They're left wondering if they picked the "right" one.
Trust Dilution Every new feature or option implicitly asks customers to trust that you've executed it well. Too many options mean too many trust requests.
The Psychology Behind Choice Paralysis
A famous study at a grocery store tells us everything we need to know about choice overload:
When shoppers were offered 24 varieties of jam to sample, only 3% made a purchase. When the selection was limited to 6 jams, 30% of customers bought one.
That's a 10x increase in sales by offering fewer choices.
Breaking the Complexity Cycle
Here's what other market leaders do differently:
Apple famously removed features from the iPhone that everyone thought were essential. No physical keyboard. No stylus. No replaceable battery. Each limitation became a strength.
Southwest Airlines stripped away everything that wasn't essential to their core promise: getting people where they need to go, reliably and affordably. No assigned seats. No meal service. No complex fare classes.
USAA dominates insurance not through product variety but through deep trust with military families. Their trust metric? The highest customer retention in the industry and growth almost entirely through referrals.
The pattern is clear.
Market leaders win not by offering more, but by building deeper trust in what they offer.
Building Your Trust Engine: The Framework
I met a founder last week who had a revelation. His company had spent the last year adding every feature customers requested. Their product could do everything. Yet their sales were slower than ever.
"We're drowning in capabilities," he said, "but our customers seem less confident than when we had a simpler product."
He had hit what I call the Complexity Tipping Point - the moment when adding more features starts actively destroying value.
The Warning Signs
Here's how to recognize when you've crossed this threshold:
Your sales demos keep getting longer because you have to explain more options
Your support team spends more time explaining features than solving problems
Your marketing focuses on capabilities instead of outcomes
Your customers take longer to make decisions, asking for more and more comparisons
The Hidden Pattern in Customer Behavior
When you look closely at customer behavior around the Complexity Tipping Point, you see something fascinating:
They ask for more features but use fewer of them
They spend more time evaluating options but feel less confident in their choices
They demand more capabilities but cite "complexity" as a reason for canceling
Building Trust Instead of Features
Here's how market leaders build trust systematically:
Make Reliability Visible While others hide behind feature lists, they showcase their consistency. Trader Joe's doesn't just claim quality - they show their rigorous selection process.
Weaponize Transparency Instead of hiding limitations, they lead with them. Southwest doesn't apologize for no assigned seats - they explain how it makes flights more efficient.
Own Your Choices When they decide not to offer something, they explain why. Apple doesn't just remove features - they tell you why you're better off without them.
Focus on Outcomes Instead of pitching capabilities, they flood their marketing with specific customer success stories that demonstrate real results.
The Trust Metrics That Matter
Stop measuring feature usage. Start measuring these trust indicators:
Time from first interaction to active usage
Depth of customer engagement
Speed of response to customer questions
Long-term retention rates
Customer referral velocity
The Trust-First Sales Process
Here's what happens when you build trust first:
Sales conversations transform from feature comparison to outcome discussion
Customer objections shift from "missing features" to "how soon can we start?"
Implementation time drops because there's less complexity to manage
Support costs decrease because customers use what they have more effectively
The key insight? Trust scales better than features.
When you build trust, you don't need to keep adding capabilities to grow. Your existing features become more valuable because customers trust they'll work.
Moving Forward: Your 30-Day Trust Building Plan
Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting you strip away everything tomorrow. But you need to start measuring the true cost of complexity in your business.
Here's your practical plan to shift from feature-first to trust-first growth.
Week 1: Feature Usage Reality Check
Pull up your analytics. Look at everything you offer. Now ask three questions:
What percentage of your customers use each feature?
Which capabilities drive real engagement versus occasional use?
What features are customers actually paying for?
The patterns will likely shock you. Most businesses discover that 80% of their customer value comes from just 20% of their features.
Week 2: Find Your Trust Gaps
Document every moment where customers hesitate or ask for reassurance. Look for patterns in:
Sales call questions
Support tickets
Cancellation reasons
Feature requests
You'll start seeing that most "feature requests" are really trust requests in disguise.
Week 3: Build Your Trust Assets
Start creating proof of trust:
Document specific customer outcomes
Capture transformation stories
Record usage patterns
Build before/after comparisons
Most importantly: Make your limitations visible. Explain what you don't do and why.
Week 4: Reshape Your Narrative
Transform how you talk about your product:
Replace feature lists with outcome stories
Switch from capability comparisons to confidence builders
Move from "what it does" to "why it works"
The Confidence Paradox
Here's where it gets interesting. When you dig deeper, you often find that your most successful customers use fewer features than those who struggle or leave.
Think about that for a moment.
Your best customers aren't the ones using everything you offer. They're the ones who trust you enough to focus on what matters.
Your Next Move
Pull up your product roadmap right now. Look at your next three planned additions. For each one, ask:
"Are we adding this because of missing trust or missing features?"
Because here's the truth about slow sales:
You're not losing customers because you offer too little
You're not falling behind because of missing features
You're just solving the wrong problem
Maybe it's time to stop adding features and start adding trust.
The Choice Is Yours
You can keep playing the feature game. Keep adding more options. Keep making things more complex.
Or you can make the counter-intuitive choice that market leaders make:
Build deeper trust rather than more features. Focus on confidence rather than capabilities. Solve for trust rather than complexity.
Your future customers will thank you for it.
Until next week,
Scott