The hardest part of building something isn't deciding what to add — it's deciding what to protect once you've already added too much. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian had a phrase for the disease that ruins good work: *amplificatio sine modo* — amplification without limit — the compulsion to keep elaborating past the point of clarity, because stopping feels like giving up. Product managers live in this trap constantly. Every feature request arrives with a real problem behind it, every stakeholder need is legitimate, and yet the accumulation of legitimate things produces something no one understands. Quintilian's remedy wasn't subtraction for its own sake — it was *decorum*, the discipline of fitness to purpose: asking not 'is this good?' but 'is this good *here*, for *this*?' That's a different question entirely, and it reframes your role. You're not a collector of good ideas. You're a curator of coherence.

What is the most recent thing you added — to a product, a process, or a plan — that you justified as necessary but actually just felt easier than cutting something else?

Drawing from Classical Rhetoric (Quintilian) — Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (Institutio Oratoria, c. 95 CE)