The Curse of the "Improvement": Understanding Verschlimmbesserung in Tech

By Nick Schmidt | August 25, 2026

The German language provides a precise term for that frustrating experience you had with your last software patch: Verschlimmbesserung.

Essentially, it describes an improvement attempted improvement that actually results in a worse state than before. It is a phenomenon that software engineering desperately needs to start acknowledging.

The SaaS Struggle

We have all encountered that specific brand of "progress" where a SaaS update:

• Relocates a critical button.
• Rebrands a familiar menu.
• Completely destroys a daily workflow.

In these instances, a product team has successfully delivered a "better" user experience—except they solved a problem that nobody actually had.

The Root Cause: Misaligned Incentives

The catalyst for this issue was identified decades ago by Eliyahu Goldratt. He highlighted the dangerous link between measurement and action:

"Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way… do not complain about illogical behaviour…"

When a company prioritizes the frequency of point releases over the actual quality of the product, they are effectively incentivizing Verschlimmbesserung.

The Logic of Bad Updates

We can express the relationship between metrics ($M$) and behavior ($B$) as: $\text{Behavior} \approx f(\text{Metric})$

If the metric is simply "Shipping," the behavior will be "Shipping," regardless of whether the result is beneficial.

The Cycle of Forced Innovation

The following diagram illustrates how corporate incentives lead to product degradation:

A Lesson in Stability

Consider the longevity of Office 2003. It remains remarkably functional and useful today precisely because it wasn't subjected to a relentless cycle of forced reinvention.

def software_update(current_state):
    if incentive == "ship_at_all_costs":
        return "Verschlimmbesserung" # It's worse now
    elif incentive == "solve_real_problem":
        return "Actual Improvement"
    else:
        return current_state

Product Manager's Checklist

To avoid this trap, teams should ask:

• Does this change solve a documented user pain point?
• Does the metric reward the outcome or just the output?
• Will this break a legacy workflow for a marginal gain?