Before Removing Friction, Ask What It Protects

InnovationBefore Removing Friction, Ask What It ProtectsByJeromee Johnson,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 28, 2026, 06:00am EDTJeromee Johnson, President & CTO, Tellus App - Building the new and impactful at the intersection of PropTech and FinTech. getty​Most product teams are trained to see friction as the enemy.​That training is mostly right. A sign-up flow that requires nine fields when three would do is friction. So is the eighth password reset of the week, or a maintenance ticket that bounces across four systems before reaching anyone who can fix it. Discipline in removing friction builds better software. ​But not all friction is the same. The technology leaders being trained right now will spend their careers inside systems where the wrong removal of friction might move money, grant access, trigger trades, approve credit, dispatch vendors and ship code into production before anyone has stopped to ask why the old guardrail existed.​Three Kinds Of Friction​Three kinds of friction live inside most products. The first is waste—duplicate data entry, manual routing, status-chasing, disconnected systems. Remove it. The second is confusion—too many options, unclear next steps, hidden trade-offs. Redesign it. The third is protection—underwriting, confirmation, cooling-off periods, identity verification, human escalation. Be careful.​The third kind is the one that sometimes gets miscategorized. It can look like waste because it slows a user down. It can look like confusion when it adds steps. But its job is to give the user a moment they may need to understand the consequence before the system moves. That moment can look inefficient on a dashboard, but sometimes, it is the whole point.​Agentic AI Changes The Equation​Agentic AI makes the distinction urgent. McKinsey's March 2026 analysis of agen...