Optimise Is Maximise With Better Manners

You never see the growth target. You see beautiful web copy. Soft type. Warm colour. Come back tomorrow. We saved your streak. We’re so glad you’re here. In plain English the company wants more people back a week after they first open the app. On the marketing site that sounds like care. Under it the ideas are uglier. A push notification that fires at dinner. A streak that guilt-trips you if you miss a day. A cancel path buried so deep you give up. Nobody says maximise. The manners are perfect. In the Quarterly Business Review the Chief Product Officer points at a green line and says this has to climb again next quarter. The person who will get the 9pm notification is not here.

Optimise can mean make the thing kinder: fewer bugs, clearer words, a cancel that works the first time. That kind has a stop. When there is no stop, only a chart that wants more people back by any soft means, optimise is maximise with better manners: same hunger, dinner etiquette, same last chop. Milton Friedman told America the job of business was to grow its profits. friedman-nyt-1970 Boards still hum a softer tune. Product teams live the hard one. They just stopped saying the hard word.

Where the Soft Word Came From

In 1970 the hard word was out in the open. Friedman wrote that bosses who chased “social” aims alongside profit were preaching socialism. friedman-nyt-1970 My professor John Paul Rollert keeps telling Booth rooms that the wall fell and the creed did not, and that the law never locked CEOs into the cartoon version of maximise. rollert-ceos-free CEOs got freer than their decks admit. We did not. Our decks got thicker, and the words on them got kinder.

The hard word changed clothes. Pay that rises only when the number rises. A number that stands in for a person who came back. A screen that stands in for the number. By the time the language reached design and growth, maximise sounded rude. Optimise sounded like help. Healthy engagement. Delight. Activation. The carving set arrived before the meat. At Booth I learned that people follow what they are paid to follow. In Design Your Own Life I wrote about scoreboards we inherit and treat as fate. You do not have to love Friedman to live inside his soft religion. You only have to open the review deck and feel relieved when your row is green.

Manners Upstairs, Manners in the Funnel

In 2019 nearly two hundred chief executives signed a statement promising customers, staff, suppliers, towns, and shareholders all at once. brt-2019 That is upstairs manners. Soft nouns. Warm light.

Downstairs that sentence almost never appears. The optimise line does. Time on screen is not care. A green return bar is not someone who would still choose you if leaving were easy. In Why We Designed Contempt Into Our Interfaces I argued that the feed can hate you before any designer arrives. Contempt is what maximise looks like after it has been renamed optimise and handed to a squad that needs the week’s number to move.

When Optimise Is Honest

Without a clear aim, companies swell. Managers chase status. Kindness becomes a workshop while the money runs out. Friedman’s fear was not invented. One hard number can kill a thousand vanity projects. If you have never watched utilisation fall and billable hours dry up while the firm still sells workshops, you have not earned the right to sneer at maximise.

Grant that. Then keep the manners honest. Fix the bugs. Shorten the copy. Speed the load. Let someone leave on the first ask. That is optimise with a stop. My professor’s useful fork for bosses is grow as much as you can, or make enough and still do some good. rollert-merely-profitable Product needs the same fork. Good enough return with a clean goodbye is not failure. It is a company that can still meet the user’s eyes. I have sat in rooms that chose the other fork. The shame is that it felt like competence.

The Person Who Pays for the Manners

That hunger wears a smile when someone tries to leave. In Subscription Fatigue Is the Wrong Instrument I wrote about Andrej in Northampton, locked mid-export, asked five times whether he was sure he meant no. Each Are you sure? is a small shove. By the fifth he is not deciding. He is exhausted. The platform kept the month. The Quarterly Business Review would have called that optimising return. At dinner you do not grab the last chop and shout mine. You ask if you should carve. Soft religion is the carving set: etiquette that makes taking look like care.

Optimise sounded kinder than maximise. The chart still asked for more. Andrej paid for the manners while the green line stayed green, and I know exactly how that green can feel like winning.