There was a time when product managers were limited by what was technically possible.
If you wanted to add a feature, engineers had to build it. If they said it would take three months, it took three months. If they said it was impossible, it was impossible.
Constraints forced clarity.
You couldn't build everything. So you had to choose what mattered most. The feature roadmap was naturally curated by the laws of physics and engineering time.
That's changing. And it's making product management harder, not easier.
The Paradox of Possibility
With modern tools—no-code platforms, AI-assisted development, cloud infrastructure, third-party APIs—you can build almost anything.
Someone has already built 90% of what you want to build. You can plug it in. Configure it. Ship it in days instead of months.
This should be liberation. Instead, it's paralysis.
Because now the constraint isn't "What can we build?"
The constraint is "What should we build?"
And that's infinitely harder to answer.
When everything is possible, nothing is obvious.
The Museum vs. The Everything Store
There's a difference between a museum and a department store.
A museum is curated. Every piece is there for a reason. You could spend hours understanding the relationship between objects. The curation tells a story.
A department store has everything. Clothes, furniture, kitchen utensils, toys. Something for everyone. But there's no story. No thesis. Just... stuff.
Most products today are department stores.
They have features for everyone. Customization options to satisfy every user segment. Integrations with every platform. Countless ways to accomplish the same task.
And they're exhausting to use.
The best products are museums.
They have opinions. They do one thing (or a few things) exceptionally well. They're curated around a thesis about what matters. And that clarity makes them beloved.
Think of Apple. Think of Figma. Think of Stripe. These aren't products that do everything. They're products that do specific things beautifully because someone had the discipline to say "no" to everything else.
That discipline is curation.
The Cost of Addition
Here's what most product managers don't understand about features:
Every feature costs, even the ones people use.
It costs cognitive load. Users have to learn it. They have to remember it exists. They have to decide whether to use it.
It costs simplicity. The interface gets more complex. The onboarding gets longer. The product gets harder to learn.
It costs maintenance. Someone has to keep the feature working as you update everything else. Bugs appear. Edge cases emerge. That feature you shipped three years ago is now a third of your support burden.
It costs focus. Your team's attention is divided. Instead of obsessing over the core experience, they're maintaining legacy features.
It costs opportunity. Every engineer you assign to maintain old features is an engineer you can't assign to new ideas.
The question "Should we build this feature?" isn't really about the feature. It's about whether the value it creates justifies all these costs.
Most of the time, it doesn't.
But we build it anyway. Because it's possible. Because someone asked for it. Because the analysis shows it might increase engagement by 2%.
The 2% gained is real. But the costs are invisible.
Curation is About Saying No
The job of a curator isn't to add more pieces to a museum. It's to thoughtfully remove pieces that don't belong.
It's about asking: "Does this belong in our story?"
And being willing to answer: "No. Not even if it's beautiful. Not even if someone loves it. It doesn't belong here."
This is where product managers fail.
We're trained to optimize for "yes." Yes to more features. Yes to more users. Yes to more growth. Yes to more revenue.
But optimization isn't multiplication. It's subtraction.
The product that matters isn't the one with the most features. It's the one where every feature is essential. Where nothing can be removed without diminishing the whole.
That's what curation feels like.
And it requires saying "no" to 90% of ideas. Most of which are good ideas. Ideas that work. Ideas that create value.
But ideas that don't belong in this product.
The Thesis
Every curated product has a thesis. An underlying belief about what it's for and what it's not for.
Apple's thesis: "Technology should be beautiful and intuitive. We will sacrifice universal compatibility for a seamless experience."
Figma's thesis: "Design should be collaborative and accessible. We will build in the browser even if it's harder, because it democratizes design."
Stripe's thesis: "Payments should be invisible and reliable. We will handle the complexity so you don't have to."
These theses make decisions obvious. Should we support Windows? (Apple: No. It contradicts our thesis.) Should we build a desktop app? (Figma: No. Browser-first is our thesis.) Should we build an accounting system? (Stripe: No. Invisible, reliable payments is our thesis.)
The thesis is a filter. It's a way of saying: "We do this. We don't do that."
And that clarity is what makes products legendary.
The Hard Part
Curation requires conviction.
You have to believe strongly enough in your thesis that you can say "no" to features you know will work. No to users who want them. No to investors who see the revenue potential.
This is why so many product managers fail at curation. It's not a skill problem. It's a courage problem.
It's easy to say "yes." Yes to everyone. Yes to every idea. Yes to every request.
It's hard to say "no." Especially when you can say "yes."
Because saying "no" means you're choosing. You're betting that your thesis is right. That the features you're excluding aren't actually necessary. That simplicity matters more than completeness.
That's a bet. And bets can fail.
But the products that matter are the ones where the bet won. Where someone had the courage to build a museum instead of a department store.
Your Job as a PM
If you're building a product in 2025, your job isn't to manage features or optimize metrics or close the sales funnel.
Your job is to be a curator.
To develop a clear thesis about what your product is. To internalize that thesis so deeply that decisions become obvious. To protect your product from feature creep by saying "no" to wonderful ideas that don't belong.
To build a museum, not a department store.
Because in a world where anything is possible, clarity becomes the rarest and most valuable thing.
And clarity comes from curation.
From someone brave enough to say: "We do this. We don't do that. And that's what makes us matter."