Value = Money?

The Path to Enshittification

Companies often equate value to money,

This is a terrible mistake.

You can't make money without (perceived) value, and you can't make (perceived) value without money.

Business cases often mostly talk about value as money.

We do the work, and as a result we will get a certain amount of money.

The problem is that the work often doesn’t directly result in money. There is a whole chain of events that must happen before there will be more people who are willing to part ways with more money. Especially in the context of software products.

You make your e-commerce website 10 percent faster. How much more money will it make? That’s an easy question to provide a decent answer.

You make it 10 percent easier to write a message in Gmail by using AI. How much more money will it make? Much more difficult question to tie to a precise monetary value.

RICE prioritization does not help with prioritizing creating value vs. capturing value, in fact it often skews the work towards capturing value.

Remember, it all starts with creating value.

If you don't understand how you're creating value, it is hard to make money.

Even when you understand how you’re creating value, making money is still hard.

Once you shift the focus to mostly capturing value, you’re on the magnificent road to enshittification.

That’s what LinkedIn is doing. It’s a soul-sucking vampire that doesn’t care much about its users. It wants more blood. They only want to extract more money and they definitely don’t want you to have success from LinkedIn without them getting a slice of the pie.

The problem with this philosophy is that people don’t care much about LinkedIn because LinkedIn doesn’t care much about them.

It all starts with creating value and if a platform shifts too much towards extracting value it will make people feel dirty for using the platform.

The end result: enshittification.

Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

Value isn’t money, but you need money to keep creating value, and you need value to keep making money.

Enshittification means the business has tilted towards making money over creating value.

In the long-term that leaves you exposed and puts the whole business at risk.