The acrid, blue-black smoke of charred garlic is currently curling around the edges of my laptop screen, a bitter, atmospheric reminder that I am currently failing at two distinct tasks simultaneously. I was supposed to be deglazing a pan for a simple carbonara, but instead, I was staring at a PDF of a ‘simplified’ user flow that had somehow expanded to 188 pages. My dinner is a carbonized ruin because I was trying to understand how a project that started as a sleek, muscular horse had somehow grown two humps, a set of prehistoric-looking hooves, and a temperament that suggests it wants to spit in the eye of any user brave enough to approach it.

We have all been there. You start with a vision. It is lean. It is purposeful. It is the Horse. You want to get from Point A to Point B with speed and grace. But then, the 8 stakeholders arrive. They don’t arrive with malintent; they arrive with ‘perspectives.’ And that is where the tragedy begins. The committee isn’t trying to build a monster; they are trying to protect their individual kingdoms, and the result is a negotiated treaty of competing agendas that we politely call a product.

The project in question started with a mandate that should have taken 8 days to map out: a one-page registration form. It was meant to be the gateway, the low-friction entry point for a new service. But as the cursor blinked on the screen during our third marathon Zoom call, I watched the horse’s legs get replaced by something much heavier and more cumbersome.

Legal was the first to arrive at the stable. They didn’t see a horse; they saw a liability. They insisted on a 48-word disclaimer right under the ‘First Name’ field, followed by 8 mandatory checkboxes confirming that the user had read a privacy policy that no human has ever finished in a single sitting. Marketing followed close behind. They didn’t see a horse either; they saw a data-mining opportunity. They added 8 ‘optional’ fields regarding household income, preferred vacation spots, and the age of the user’s primary pet. Then IT stepped in, declaring that for security reasons, we needed a CAPTCHA that requires identifying 8 different storefronts in low-resolution photography, followed by an 18-character password requirement that must include at least one ancient Babylonian glyph.

By the time the ‘simplified’ form was approved, it was a 4-page odyssey. It was no longer a horse. It was a camel. It was built to survive the internal desert of corporate bureaucracy, but it was absolutely useless for the person trying to win a race.

The product is a perfect map of the organization’s internal scars.

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I think about what Ava N., an addiction recovery coach I spoke with last week, told me about systemic failure. Ava has spent 18 years watching people try to rebuild their lives, and she noticed a recurring pattern. ‘People fail,’ she said, ‘when they try to please 8 different versions of themselves at the same time… You can’t design a life by committee. You have to pick the one thing that matters and sacrifice the rest.’

Ava N. sees this in her practice every day. When a client tries to ‘negotiate’ their recovery-trying to keep 8% of their old habits while expecting 100% of a new result-they end up with a life that looks like that camel. It’s a series of compromises that keeps them stationary. They aren’t moving toward health; they are just managing the tension between their conflicting desires.

This is exactly what happens in product design. We are so afraid of internal conflict that we solve it by saying ‘yes’ to everyone inside the building, which effectively says ‘no’ to everyone outside of it. We optimize for the silo. The Marketing Director gets their 8 tracking pixels. The Legal Counsel gets their 48 lines of fine print. The IT Architect gets their 18 layers of redundancy. Everyone goes back to their desk feeling like they ‘won’ their specific battle. Meanwhile, the user is staring at a screen, wondering why it takes 28 minutes to sign up for a service that promised to save them time.

There is a name for this: Conway’s Law. It suggests that organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. If you have a fragmented, siloed, and politically charged company culture, you will inevitably produce a fragmented, siloed, and frustrating product. You cannot hide your internal mess from your customer; it will manifest in the UI. It will show up in the loading times. It will be the ‘hump’ on the camel that the user has to climb over.

I looked at my burnt dinner and realized I had done the same thing. I tried to optimize for the call, for the email I was typing, and for the garlic in the pan. By trying to serve all three, I ended up with nothing to eat and a headache from the 128th slide of the presentation.

The real cost of ‘design by committee’ isn’t just a bad product; it’s the erosion of trust. When a user interacts with a camel, they know immediately that you didn’t build it for them. They can feel the presence of the 8 different departments through the screen. They can sense the committee meetings. They can hear the compromise. And in an era where attention is the most valuable currency, asking someone to navigate your internal politics just to use your service is a form of industrial-strength arrogance.

Ava N. told me about a client of hers who had 28 different apps on his phone to track his sobriety, his sleep, his diet, and his mood. He was spending 88 minutes a day just inputting data into these systems. She made him delete 27 of them. ‘Pick one,’ she said. ‘One goal. One path. One horse.’

Within 8 weeks, his anxiety levels had dropped by nearly 48%. He wasn’t doing more; he was doing less, but he was doing the right thing. He stopped being a camel and started being a runner again.

We are obsessed with more. More features, more data, more security, more ‘value-adds.’ But value isn’t additive; it’s transformative. If your product doesn’t transform the user’s experience by making it simpler, then all your features are just extra weight. Every time you add a field to a form, you are taxing the user’s soul. Every time you add a layer of bureaucracy to a process, you are building a hump.