It’s a common request.
“Can we make that editable?”
“Can we control that from the admin panel?”
“Can the client update that later without needing code?”
On the surface, it seems like a smart idea. The more editable your app is, the more flexible it becomes. You don’t have to involve developers for every change. You can react faster to updates. You’re future-proofing, right?
But we’ve seen the other side. Admin tools that spiral into full-blown app builders. CMS interfaces that confuse internal users. White-labeled systems so complex that no one feels confident updating anything. And teams spending precious early-stage resources building customization options for things that rarely (or never) change.
At Telos, we help our clients draw the line. We build admin tools where they matter—and skip them where they don’t. Because not everything needs to be editable. And sometimes, less flexibility leads to a better product.
Editability Comes at a Cost—Even if It Seems Simple
Every time you make something editable, you introduce:
- A new UI to design and build
- Validation rules to write and test
- New failure modes to account for
- New complexity in QA and content workflows
And more importantly, you move control away from the system—and into the hands of users who may not fully understand the implications.
We’ve seen products break because someone changed a config that wasn’t meant to be touched. Or spent hours debugging an issue, only to realize it came from a misformatted field in a white-labeled admin interface.
These aren’t rare edge cases. They’re the natural outcome of a product that tries to make everything configurable, before it’s clear what actually needs to be.
Our Rule: Make Editable What’s Meant to Change Often
There’s a simple lens we use to help clients decide what to make editable:
If it needs to change often, and it’s risky or inefficient to do it in code—it probably belongs in the admin.
That includes things like:
- Event content
- Configurable templates
- Dynamic user-facing text
- Marketing copy and notifications
But the name of your app?
The structure of your navigation?
The order of onboarding steps?
Whether a feature should even be visible?
Those are better handled as design and product decisions—not toggles in a settings panel.
Your Admin Panel Should Empower, Not Confuse
We’ve seen admin dashboards with dozens of nested menus, most of which no one knows how to use. Custom branding tools with more complexity than the rest of the product combined. CMS fields so granular and unlabeled that teams have to email support just to remember which one controls which section.
A good admin panel is like a cockpit. It gives your team the right amount of control over the things they need to fly the plane—but it doesn’t ask them to rewire the engine mid-flight.
We build admin tools that are easy to navigate, hard to break, and directly tied to workflows that matter. That often means fewer fields, not more.
When in Doubt, Hardcode It First
There’s nothing wrong with hardcoding early. In fact, we often recommend it.
If something doesn’t need to change weekly, and you’re still validating the feature, we’ll start with a simple, static implementation. That gives you time to prove it’s valuable—before investing in configurability.
Sometimes, clients come back and say, “We thought we’d need to edit this, but turns out we never do.” That’s a win. That’s time and budget saved.
And if it does become worth editing? We’ll know exactly what matters, and we’ll build it well.
Build the Product First. Then Build the Admin That Supports It.
We’re not anti-editability. We’re anti-default-editability.
We help our clients make smart decisions about what should be dynamic, what should be fixed, and what can wait. That means fewer “just in case” features and more clarity for the people managing your product behind the scenes.
If you’re spinning up a new product—or trying to simplify an old one—we’d love to help.
Let’s make sure the tools behind the scenes are as purposeful as the product your users see.
