How throwing away a million lines of code helps

In this episode of Datadrivet, Joni talks with Robert Ingemarsson, Chief Product and Tech Officer at TimeWave AB, which builds technical solutions for cleaning companies and other service businesses. The whole conversation runs against the usual instinct to keep adding. Robert makes the case for removing features that users do not use, because doing so can cut costs and lift profitability.

He tells the story of how it played out at TimeWave. After stripping features off the login homepage of their SaaS product, he braced for customer service complaints. None came. That silence gave the team confidence to keep going: 30 items removed, then another 30, with no fallout.

The episode digs into why deletion is so hard to do, even when it clearly helps. Two psychological forces come up. Loss aversion means people feel the pain of a potential loss more sharply than the pleasure of an equivalent gain, so removing anything feels worse than it should. The sunk cost fallacy means teams keep investing in something simply because time and money already went into it, even as the returns shrink. Robert draws on his time at both Avanza and TimeWave to talk about how he persuaded teams to let go and cut code.

The takeaway, in his words: listen, get inspired, and throw away your code. Less surface area can mean a clearer product and a healthier business.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for the full conversation with Robert Ingemarsson.