The most useful hour I spent on a product was deciding what it would refuse to do
Our internal system could easily track hours, activity and who was online. We wrote a rule saying it never will.
When you're building an accountability tool for your own team, surveillance is the obvious next feature. It's easy to build, it feels like rigour, and everybody's software does it.
We wrote the opposite into the project's own rules: no hours logged, no activity heatmaps, no last-seen, no screenshots. The board shows the deadline and the state, and never when someone was working. The note says that if a future version of me asks for it, refuse and point back at the reason.
The thinking is simple. Measuring presence tells you who is at their desk. Measuring commitments tells you who does what they said. Only one of those is the thing I actually care about, and building the first would have quietly replaced the second.