It's a Feature, Not a Bug
A story reflecting the virtue of simple ingenuity.
Before the days of Zoom calls and sweatpants meetings, the commute was a sacred, shared ritual within our society. The pulse of this country’s economy beat proudly, and the heart of American industry was New York City.
As the sun rose, people would wake up to a newspaper on their doorstep and brew a steaming pot of black coffee. In those days, every trip to the office merited your Sunday best. Gentlemen could tie a full Windsor in their sleep. They’d don a tweed sport coat with perfectly polished shoes. Ladies would wear heels, a full face of makeup, and an outfit from this season’s catalog. Americans would then kiss their spouse goodbye and race out the door to catch the next train.
Without airpods or iPhones, you only had a handful of entertainment options during your commute. You could trade smiles and conversation with a stranger. Perhaps enjoy the next chapter of a novel. Or look out the window to take in the sights and sounds of the city that never sleeps.
Workers flowed into Manhattan through a cobweb of subway cars and automobiles. Everyone was in a hurry before their day had even begun. But it was a sense of purpose, rather than restlessness, that sent citizens into this morning frenzy.
At one point, plans were drawn up to erect a magnificent new skyscraper as another towering tree in the concrete jungle. Architects were tasked with creating a structure that could double as a monument to this capitalist system. It was to proudly stand over 50 stories tall and its art deco facade would aesthetically draw pedestrian eyes up towards the heavens.
Like christening a ship ahead of her maiden voyage, the completed high-rise was leased up and tenants moved in across its dozens of floors. However, it was only then when a terrible design flaw surfaced—this towering behemoth did not have enough elevators.
Worker bees would pour into the lobby from all ends of the city at precisely 8:59 AM to be met with a rude reality. Even if they packed in like sardines, waiting your turn for an elevator lift would take at least five minutes.
Their perfectly orchestrated morning trek had now hit a bottleneck that could not be overcome. The limited elevator capacity meant this delay was inevitable. Infuriated commuters must wait in line at the footstep of their office before taking to their desks.
The building’s owner quickly became desperate for a fix to this design bug. Consultants were hired to map out elevator-efficiency plans but came up empty handed. Engineers were onboarded to increase pulley speeds to no avail. Nothing could fix this unanticipated flaw.
Defeated, the owner finally called the lobby’s interior decorator and requested more seating to accommodate the clog of angry tenants pooling up every morning. The decorator was happy to supply more sofas but took the assignment a step further. She decided to line the walls of the lobby with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. What happened next was inexplicable to the owner; within a week, the commuter complaints had stopped entirely.
Because of the simplest design change, a bottleneck that had commuters fuming and pulling out their hair, had suddenly become the most beloved part of their mornings. The addition of mirrors presented the opportunity to run a comb through your hair, to straighten your tie, or powder your nose just moments before seeing your coworkers.
Best of all, these last-minute touch ups came across as vanity-free. Publicly obsessing over your reflection was usually a social faux pas. But after all, how else could you kill time as you stood there waiting? Without smartphones, there was no mindlessly scrolling TikTok or getting a headstart on Slack messages. This moment of pause had become a feature of the new building, rather than a bug.
Work in tech long enough and you will undoubtedly hear the famous quip—“It’s a Feature, Not a Bug.” This saying is usually retorted by a PM trying to throw salespeople off his scent or a wisecracking engineer who's already gearing up for his next code sprint.
By combining the age-old adages “See the glass half full” and “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, this axiom relays a scrappy, customer-focused approach to problem solving. Every product manager knows you must give the user what they need, not what they tell you they want.
Like simply putting up mirrors in a lobby, the hairiest problems don’t always require a very hairy solution. Sometimes all it takes is a dose of optimism and a stroke of ingenuity to keep the heart of America’s economy pumping.