Experience Doesn’t Always Add More
We often associate experience with sophistication; more detailed processes, more advanced tools and more elaborate solutions.
Experience can have the opposite effect - once you’ve done something enough times, you start recognising which parts actually matter and which parts are simply convention, precaution or unnecessary complexity.
You know which questions need answering and which don’t; you know where additional features will create value and where they’ll simply create more work.
That can make experienced people look surprisingly quick, not because they’re skipping important steps, but because they’ve learned which steps aren’t important in the first place.
Experience isn’t always knowing what else to add. Sometimes it’s knowing what you can safely leave out.
Complexity Often Starts With the Brief
Web projects are a good example. An agency might understand design, development and technology extremely well, but they’re often dependent on the organisation to explain what needs to be built.
However, this is where complexity can creep in; the people briefing the agency may understand the organisation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they understand the work the website needs to support.
Requirements get added because somebody thinks they might be useful, features replicate existing processes without questioning them, internal structures become navigation or exceptions become functionality.
The agency then faithfully builds what it has been asked to build - the end result can be technically excellent and unnecessarily complicated.
Understanding the organisation isn’t the same as understanding the work.
Simplicity Comes From Better Judgement
The answer isn’t to remove expertise or stop asking questions - it’s to ask better ones.
- Does the customer actually need this?
- What problem does it solve?
- What happens if we don’t build it?
- Are we improving the work or simply recreating what already exists?
Experience makes those questions easier to answer because you’ve seen what happens afterwards. You’ve seen the features nobody uses, the processes that become workarounds and the sophisticated solutions that eventually need simplifying.
That changes how you approach the work… you stop asking how much you could build and start asking how little you need to build well.
Simplicity isn’t the absence of sophistication; it’s knowing where sophistication adds no value.
