Complexity's adversary: how Ishaan Agarwal is building tools that disappear

Digital Trends

07-05-2025

Table of Contents
Table of Contents The Foundation for Thinking Differently The Facebook Laboratory Microsoft's Small Business Revelation The Metrics That Actually Matter Square and the Restaurant Renaissance The Ultimate Product Philosophy
In an industry obsessed with feature bloat, Ishaan Agarwal stands apart. While most product managers race to add capabilities, Agarwal has built his career on a counterintuitive principle: reduction.
'The best products I've worked on are the ones that rigorously removed obstacles rather than adding capabilities,' says Agarwal, whose product management career spans Microsoft, Brex, and now Square.
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The Foundation for Thinking Differently
This counterintuitive approach didn't materialize from thin air. Agarwal's unusual educational path — completing both bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science at Brown University in just four years — reflects an early talent for efficiency. But the technical foundation alone doesn't explain his product philosophy.
'Computer science taught me how things work,' he says, 'but my economics and design courses taught me why they need to be built in the first place.' This interdisciplinary background, including advanced industrial design classes at the Rhode Island School of Design, cultivated a perspective that can not only architect complex systems but also understand the humans who must navigate them.
His time in Brown's Human-Computer Interaction lab cemented this approach. Under Professor Jeff Huang, Agarwal spent two years analyzing how people actually use technology, not how companies think they should. Those research findings would later inform his professional mission: to create technology so intuitive it essentially disappears.
The Facebook Laboratory
Many product managers gradually transition into the role from other positions. Agarwal took a more direct route, creating a unique learning opportunity during his summer internship at Facebook (now Meta).
'During my first week, I asked if I could shadow the product team while fulfilling my engineering duties,' he recalls. This innovative arrangement created a valuable laboratory condition—observing product strategy development by day, implementing those ideas in code by night.
The experience revealed an important insight about the product development process. 'In product meetings, teams would align on an elegant vision,' Agarwal says. 'Then as implementation progressed, that vision would naturally evolve to accommodate technical considerations, system architecture, and delivery timelines.'
Rather than seeing this as a challenge, Agarwal recognized an opportunity—to serve as an effective translator between product aspirations and technical realities. This became his professional mission: building bridges between what users need and what technology can deliver.
Microsoft's Small Business Revelation
The real testing ground for Agarwal's simplification philosophy came at Microsoft, where he joined the team behind the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. For the uninitiated, this is the control panel where businesses manage their Office, Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft subscriptions — a critical piece of infrastructure.
Originally designed for corporate IT departments, the Admin Center had evolved into a sprawling interface that made perfect sense to its creators but baffled many of its small business users who lacked a technical background but nonetheless needed to manage their digital tools.
'The team interviewed bakers, florists, neighborhood accountants — people who just wanted to add a new employee to Teams or check when their subscription renewed — getting completely lost,' Agarwal explains. 'They didn't care about tenant management or advanced security policies. They just needed to accomplish basic tasks without a computer science degree.'
Agarwal's team faced the classic product manager's dilemma: how to serve wildly different user segments with the same product. Their solution was elegant — they created a simplified view that dramatically reduced functionality but made common tasks immediately obvious.
'The answer was building two products in one,' he says. 'Power users could still access every conceivable option, but most small businesses could now accomplish most of their needs through an interface with simple options in human language rather than technical jargon.'
The metrics validated his approach dramatically. Net Promoter Score for small business users increased dramatically, and monthly active users grew to millions within a year. Most tellingly, support calls decreased — the surest sign that a product is doing its job without human intervention.
The Metrics That Actually Matter
This leads to Agarwal's more provocative perspective — that most product teams optimize for the wrong metrics altogether.
'The industry obsesses over engagement — time spent, clicks, interactions,' he says. 'But for utility software, those metrics indicate failure. If someone needs to spend 20 minutes figuring out how to add a user to their account, that's high engagement but terrible design.'
Instead, Agarwal advocates for what he calls 'disappearance metrics' — measurements of how quickly and invisibly software accomplishes its purpose. How few clicks did a task require? How quickly did users complete their objective? Did they need documentation?
Square and the Restaurant Renaissance
This philosophy has found its most complete expression in Agarwal's current role at Square, where he leads product initiatives for food and beverage technologies. Few industries better exemplify the tension between complex operations and time-starved operators than food service.
'When the software is built right, the technology almost disappears,' he says. 'Chefs can focus on their craft rather than deciphering complicated interfaces or hunting for information. That's the ultimate success — building tools so intuitive they become practically invisible.'
The Ultimate Product Philosophy
This brings us to Agarwal's fundamental thesis: that great technology should eventually make itself invisible.
'Great utility software should be like electricity,' he argues. 'You don't think about the complex infrastructure delivering power to your outlet. You just plug in your device and it works. Software should aim for that same invisibility.'
This perspective challenges the conventional wisdom of the tech industry, where feature expansion and increasing complexity are often seen as inevitable. Agarwal believes the software industry is witnessing the early stages of a pendulum swing back toward radical simplicity.
'The tech industry is approaching a saturation point with digital complexity,' he suggests. 'Every minute someone spends wrestling with needlessly complex software is a minute stolen from their actual purpose — running their business, serving their customers, or creating something meaningful,' he says. 'That's time they never get back.'
As technology accelerates, perhaps the most valuable product leaders won't be those who build the most impressive features, but those who, like Agarwal, dedicate themselves to making technology disappear — leaving behind only the solution, never the complexity.
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