Why Friction Maxxing changes product strategy in 2026

Friction is having a ✨moment✨

It’s the start of this year, and I’ve been seeing the phrase “friction maxxing” everywhere. Articles from The Guardian and Vulture (and, of course, many a TikTok take!) are framing this as a quiet counter-trend to a decade of digital optimisation and convenience. 

At its simplest, friction maxxing is the idea that removing effort from every part of life hasn’t necessarily made us happier. That some things feel more meaningful when they require intention, time, or work. This looks like less automation and more effort where it counts.

What’s interesting is that this idea isn’t coming from product teams or tech companies. It’s coming from culture. From people reflecting on how frictionless their lives have become and questioning whether that’s actually made things better in a deeper sense.

Building products that help people put their phones down

As the Product Manager for the Soho House member app, it’s a strange and interesting place to sit with this idea. In many ways, success in my role looks like members spending less time on their phones.

If I’m doing my job well, the app helps people get out into the world. Booking a meal, discovering a talk, visiting a different House, or booking a bedroom. Engaging with real spaces, people, and experiences. My product exists to enable life off the screen, not pull attention back to it.

That tension has been sitting with me more as conversations around AI accelerate.

The frictionless promise of AI

For years, AI has been pitched to product teams as the ultimate friction killer. Faster decisions. Fewer steps. Smarter defaults. Invisible systems doing the thinking for you. And for a while, that promise felt aligned with good product practice.

But now there’s a visible shift. A growing discomfort with over-automation and a backlash against tools that optimise everything while stripping out meaning and creativity. Alongside that is a broader unease about the environmental cost of AI, from rising energy use to the water required to power it. People are starting to question whether removing friction from every moment actually improves their lives, or just flattens them while quietly costing more than we admit.

So what does this mean for product managers? Especially those of us building consumer products.

When USPs stop holding up

My bet is that this moment pushes us away from talking about USPs and towards something more durable: product moats.

For a long time, product strategy has leaned heavily on differentiation at the feature level. What does your product do that others don’t? What’s the aha moment? In an AI world, those answers are becoming less meaningful by the month. Most “AI-powered” features can be replicated quickly, often with the same underlying models, the same prompts, and the same outcomes.

That creates a real problem. If features are easy to copy and convenience is no longer universally desirable, then differentiation through speed and automation alone stops working. A frictionless experience isn’t enough of a reason for users to stay.

Why moats matter more now

A product moat is the protection around a product. It’s what stops competitors from simply copying features and taking users, in the same way a moat protects a castle from easy attack. A product moat isn’t about what your product can do in isolation. It’s about why users keep coming back even when alternatives exist. It’s built over time through things like trust, habit, accumulated context, community, and workflows that quietly become part of everyday life.

When I think of product moat, I think of …

Habits that fit naturally into someone’s life: Strava works because the effort is part of the value. Logging runs and seeing progress over time turns activity into a habit. That habit, plus the history and identity built around it, creates a moat. Switching isn’t just changing tools, it means breaking a routine and leaving progress behind.

Context that improves with use: ChatGPT has a year plus of my questions, preferences, and patterns of thinking. That accumulated context makes it far more useful to me than Gemini or Claude, simply because I haven’t invested the same time in them. They haven’t learned from me in the same way.

Communities that feel hard to leave: Some of you are probably still on Facebook, not because it’s delightful, but because of a community you’re still connected to.

Workflows that are embedded rather than flashy: Products that quietly become part of how you work or live, where switching feels disruptive even if the alternative looks better on paper.

Seen through this lens, AI becomes a supporting actor rather than the star. Not something you ship to impress, but something you use quietly to reinforce the moat. Helping people make better choices rather than faster ones. Adding depth instead of stripping effort away. Creating experiences that feel intentional, not automatic.

That’s the shift I think product teams need to start making. From asking “what’s our USP?” to asking “what would make this genuinely hard to replace?” Especially in a world where both AI and users are pushing back on frictionless everything.

Questions to ask when thinking about your product moat 

If friction maxxing is about being more intentional, then building moats starts with asking better questions. For example:

• Where does effort create value for our users, rather than friction we should remove?
• What would users lose if they stopped using our product tomorrow?
• Which habits or routines are we reinforcing over time?
• What context are we accumulating that would be hard to recreate elsewhere?
• Are we using AI to deepen trust and understanding, or just to move faster?

Where this leaves me…

So I’m going into 2026 with friction in mind. Choosing depth over trending technology and long term value over short term wins. Not asking how we can remove one more step, but whether that step exists for a reason. If friction maxxing is about being more intentional, then product managers should be leading that shift, not reacting to it. In a world where almost anything can be copied, that might be the strongest moat we have.