Let's resist enshittification

The first episode of Black Mirror season 7 hits hard: a woman gets a connected technological device implanted in her brain. At first, everything seems promising. But soon, she discovers that to unlock certain features, she has to pay. Then, to maintain vital functions, she has to pay again. Costs pile up, free options disappear, and she finds herself trapped in a downward spiral where survival becomes a luxury.

This dystopian scenario illustrates perfectly the concept of enshittification, introduced by writer Cory Doctorow. This term describes the progressive degradation of digital services: first enticing, then profitable, and finally exasperating — once users are captive. Quality declines, friction increases, and every action becomes monetized.

But this phenomenon doesn’t just affect big platforms. We see this logic spreading in many so-called “value-driven” product approaches. With each iteration, a feature or change is justified by a clear return on investment: improved conversion, reduced acquisition cost, lower churn… The idea is that value is created from accumulating these micro-gains.

Is that really the case? Sure, the numbers go up. But does the user experience truly improve? Is the value we’re creating actually sustainable? Or are we slowly undermining the very essence of the product just to tick the right boxes on a dashboard?

Didier Hilhorst, former Product Manager at Uber, shared a revealing anecdote during our last product event co-organized with the European unicorn Qonto. A modification to the Uber app improved the key metric of wait time when requesting a ride but made drivers’ lives harder. It was only by going into the field and experiencing the drivers’ perspective that the team understood the consequences: the new rule encouraged cars to position themselves in front of high-traffic red lights, causing stress and tension. The team could have stuck to the numbers. They chose to reverse the change instead.

This example highlights an uncomfortable truth: the logic of ROI, when applied in isolation, can lead to counterproductive decisions in the medium term. Every change seems profitable. Every KPI improves. But the overall experience insidiously gets worse. And this is how enshittification sets in. Not by cynical choice, but by a series of local optimizations, seemingly reasonable, that end up compromising trust, quality, and the soul of the product.

Investing in a product’s or a company’s invisible assets means shifting perspective. It means moving away from a logic of local optimization (where every improvement must prove its ROI) to an experience-driven approach: understanding what customers truly value, and what trade-offs they are or aren’t willing to make in real life. Because real value doesn’t lie in isolated metrics, but in coherent, fluid, desirable experiences—the kind that build trust, loyalty, and reputation over the long term. This “Return on Assets” (ROA) mindset invites a simple yet fundamental question: what sustainable value are we creating with the resources we actually have—human, technical, social, emotional?

This requires a different pace:

• Less mechanical deliveries, more time spent at the gemba
• Less feature piling, more discernment on what to preserve, strengthen, or simplify

In lean engineering, investing in invisible assets means turning product development into a structured learning activity—not a string of fragmented bets. It’s about building systems that can learn from users, from each other, and from the field. Real performance isn’t measured by what we ship. It’s measured by what we understand.

In short, resisting enshittification means choosing the path of quality, coherence, and responsibility. It means remembering that our products aren’t just conversion machines—they’re vehicles for connection, meaning, and trust. And once those assets are damaged, no product update can fix them.

This editorial was published in the April–May 2025 issue of the Taktique newsletter.