Taking risks
Making product bets feels risky. Not making product bets is dangerous.
Making product bets feels risky. You need to map through a problem space, to a cohesive deeply integrated solution. Something that feels native.
There are many strategies to get there. My preferred approach is to move fast. Get to something tangible. Iterate into something beautiful.
However, it’s easy to not even start.
Many teams, faced with an uncertain future, will optimize for “how do we avoid doing the wrong thing?”
Tech debt is a visible risk, and managing it is necessary to keep the codebase sane. But when teams focus only on the risks they can see, they stop taking the ones that actually move the product forward.
My favourite way of paying down tech debt is to “leave the place a little better than you found it”. That is, when building — take a look around — if the foundations are janky, shore them up a little first. A stable base supports a strong structure.
Sometimes, focused clean-up time is required.
Paying tech debt should be a parallel mission to building something new (via tight, high-quality iteration).
Teams should be moving towards the future. If that momentum stops, it foreshadows the company falling into a flat spin.
Not building and improving the product is like stopping the car mid-race and letting the competitors fly ahead. Sure, 2 minutes in the pit replacing a broken tie rod end is fine. But — you don’t rethink and rebuild the entire platform. That would take too long.
Teams that feel comfortable taking risks and building new things perform better than those that don’t. Company culture must support this. When focus drifts away from building the best product, decision quality suffers.
Impact
The company talks about building something great. The sales team sells a vision. The marketing website backs it up. New releases get airtime and press. Internally and externally, people feel momentum. Shipping is your heartbeat.
When you’re not shipping, it seems like the company has stalled. “What’s going on in there?” Worried frowns.
It’s dishonest and incongruous when words aren’t backed by actions. Over time, credibility erodes.
Tech debt is a risk you can see. Product bets are a risk you can’t yet see.
Building something great > internal comfort.
The more you delay starting. The more you delay taking a risk. The further you push learning into the future.
Future plans, once so light and airy start feeling heavy and cumbersome. They gain weight in the background. By the time they’re revisited (if they are), they feel like something serious. Restarting momentum requires much more force than maintaining it.
Build things. Don’t delay. Don’t hold back. It’s much riskier to stop even if it feels comfortable.
Don’t lose your edge.