Project Papercut

You may be familiar with the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” or variations on that. You may not know that it has a gruesome origin.

Lingchi (Chinese: 凌遲), translated variously as the slow process, the lingering death, or slow slicing, and also known as death by a thousand cuts, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly 900 CE until it was banned in 1905

Lingchi—Wikipedia

The modern version is sometimes called “death by a thousand papercuts” and does not result in actual death but perhaps the death of a product or company.

I couldn’t find agreement on what the phrase means in modern times, so here’s my version.

Let’s say you have a product and you are putting out new versions every year. Issues get reported and are prioritized. For obvious reasons, the most serious issues are more likely to get fixed, leaving a number of small issues that didn’t bubble to the surface.

The problem comes when these small issues start to pile up. The quality and polish of a product start …