In this session, I’ll explore the illusive tradeoff between product usability and flexibility by looking into an extreme real life case study - a product feature for building network topologies. On the one hand, we would like the product to be a shiny example for usability, which could easily be used by the average Joe who can't distinguish a /24 from a /8 . On the other hand, we would like to enable expert users to go wild with their networking hallucinations and build arbitrary topologies.

It took us a few years (!!) of experiments until we got to the sweet-spot, and would like to share that journey (and many tips and conclusions) with you.