The tech industry’s obsession with “velocity” has hit a wall, and it’s not the one we expected. While we’ve been busy debating whether AI agents will replace our developers or merely augment them, a more insidious shift is occurring in the platforms we rely on to deliver value. It’s the slow, steady erosion of utility in favor of extraction—a phenomenon Cory Doctorow famously termed enshittification. For those of us leading product and engineering teams, the challenge is no longer just “can we build it?” but “can we build it without rotting the very ecosystem that supports our users?”
The Extraction Trap: When Platforms Turn on Users
In my time at companies like Nokia and easyJet, the goal was simple: provide a service so indispensable that the business naturally scaled with its utility. But look at the current landscape. We are seeing a trend where the “Rot Economy” is becoming the default business model. From search engines that bury organic results under a mountain of AI-generated slurry to social platforms that prioritise promoted outrage over genuine connection, the “user first” mantra is being sacrificed on the altar of quarterly monetisation.
Take the recent discourse on The Verge and TechCrunch regarding the decline of customer-centricity in SaaS. When a platform becomes too big to fail, it stops innovating for the user and starts innovating for the shareholder. As product leaders, we must ask: Are our roadmaps designed to solve a problem, or are they designed to lock a user in so we can eventually squeeze them?
Why Efficiency is the Enemy of Empathy
There is a dangerous paradox in modern digital transformation. We automate our customer support with LLMs, we optimise our checkout flows for maximum conversion, and we use “data-driven” insights to justify stripping away the human touch. But innovation starts with empathy, not just an Excel sheet. When we lose sight of the friction our users actually feel, we stop being product builders and start being efficiency consultants.
- The Automation Gap: Over-reliance on AI agents can create a “black box” experience where the user feels managed rather than served.
- Metric Obsession: If your North Star metric is ‘Time on Site’ but your product is a utility designed to save time, you are incentivised to make your product worse.
- The Compliance Shield: Using regulatory requirements as an excuse to degrade the user experience is a sign of a team that has lost its creative spark.
The Case of Amazon and the Whole Foods ‘Value’ Play
A classic industry example of this tension is Amazon’s ongoing evolution with Whole Foods. When the acquisition first happened, the promise was high-tech efficiency meeting high-quality retail. For a while, it worked. But as the “Amazonification” deepened—introducing more tracking, more Prime-exclusive hurdles, and a shifting focus toward logistics over the physical shopping experience—the original value proposition felt diluted. It’s a cautionary tale for any leader: you can optimise the soul out of a segment if you aren’t careful.
Building for the Long Cycle
History shows us that these bubbles of extraction always burst. The Luddites weren’t anti-technology; they were anti-technology that was used to disenfranchise workers and degrade quality. Similarly, the current wave of “techno-optimism” surrounding AI will face its own Luddite moment if we don’t focus on accessibility and ethical implementation. We need to look at the long view—the 25-year cycles of innovation—and realise that the most durable businesses are those that resist the urge to enshittify their core product for short-term gain.
The road ahead for CIOs and CPOs is one of radical honesty. We must protect our autonomous teams from the corporate bureaucracy that demands “extraction features.” We must fund the product, not the project, and ensure our engineers are as connected to the user’s pain as our designers are. If we want to avoid the rot, we have to stop treating our users as data points and start treating them as the reason we exist in the first place.
Leave a Reply