[nate]

I think most of the time this is just Parkinson's Law playing out: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"

Things get over-engineered because too much time is allowed for the task.

The forcing function that's helped me is simply giving me and my teams small but meaningful time boxes to get a feature done. Sort of like "sprints", but with more teeth. E.g. An important feature is going to get announced in a newsletter ever 2 weeks. Sprints too often don't seem to focus on the shipping to customers part.

So we focus on shipping the smallest thing that could possibly work in an arbitrary time box. You know users need X. So you make X or X' or X'' - some version or whittled down version of X that'll relieve user pain. The time box does works wonders from keeping over complexifying from getting out of control.