Hidden costs of constantly shipping new things
I work at a company that grew from a few hundred to a few thousand people in a few years&#x27; time, and there was an identical mindset and identical problems over that growth period. I started during that growth period, and 10 years later, we&#x27;re still digging ourselves out of those mistakes.<p>One reason for this was how heavily we prioritized first mover advantage. We pushed extremely hard to get into new markets, and while strategically this worked out extremely well for us, it meant that later development was hamstrung by earlier decisions. Any iteration on old features almost always meant rebuilding it entirely, and we&#x27;ve only just started to get to a place where previous efforts to do this are now paying off in increased velocity.<p>I think there&#x27;s an argument that this <i>could</i> be good, since you&#x27;re only improving features when there&#x27;s some other value you can ship. However, I think it&#x27;s short-sighted, because it means prioritizing small iterations has an unnecessarily large cost, simply because that cost wasn&#x27;t paid down slowly over time. While I do think prioritizing new markets early on was a good call, that mindset bit us in the ass in a big way when we tried to ship a very flashy new feature later in our growth cycle that crashed and burned because of tech debt, and it took us over a year to fix everything to release it. If we had taken a mindset of building for the long term five years ago, which was already years after we&#x27;d gotten to a comfortable place in revenue and marketshare, we would probably have paid off most of the major tech debt by now.<p>I honestly don&#x27;t know how a company can get past the addiction to shipping, at least not during its growth period. It can be strategically necessary, and I imagine in only a two-year period at the early stages of a company, like what&#x27;s in this article, it&#x27;s impossible to avoid. But leaders must have in the back of their heads the idea that they will need to start tipping the scales toward standardization, building to last, and building infrastructure as well as features sooner than they&#x27;d probably like to avoid larger problems in the future. And I suspect the only way leaders will really take that seriously is if they&#x27;ve gone through it before.<p>EDIT: Clarified a few points.