Wednesday 17 December 2008

Tradeoffs - You're Doing It Wrong

Our time is always our scarcest resource, and most of the web companies I know are perpetually bristling with more ideas than they could ever manage to ship. We always wish we could do them all, but at the same time we know deep down that it isn't realistic. Under these circumstances, tradeoffs are an inevitable and perfectly normal part of life.

The secret to doing this well is in what things you weigh against each other when deciding how to spend the resources you have.

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It's so easy to start down the slippery slope of trading features off against the underlying technologies that support them. Fall into this trap and you'll get a small surge of customer-facing things out quickly, but stay with the pattern (easy to do - as it does reward you well in the short term) and you'll soon find yourself paralyzed by technical debt; struggling against continuously increasing time to market and building on top of a shaky, unreliable platform.

Instead, try trading off a feature and it's supporting technology against another feature and it's supporting technology. This isn't a carte blanche ticket for building hopelessly over-provisioned systems - it's simply about setting yourself up in the most appropriate way for future requirements and scalability, rather than foregoing whatever platform work that would have been diligent and starting off behind the curve.

Trading features off against their underlying technology is not just short sighted, it's also unrealistic. You see, the fact is that all customer-facing features have to be maintained and supported anyway, no matter how badly we wish we could spend the time on other things. And right up front, when we first build each feature, we have the most control we're ever going to have over how difficult and expensive that's going to be for us.

This is a philosophy that has to make it all the way back to the start of the decision making process. When considering options, knowing the true cost of ownership is as vital as the revenue opportunity and the launch cost. Remember - you build something once, but you maintain it for life.

1 comment:

PetrolHead said...

S'funny cos I was thinking about exactly this sort of thing a couple of nights ago.

One analogy I was considering was related to oil tankers. If I keep choosing to deliver oil with my tanker rather than giving it some TLC (engine overhaul, bit of paint, maintaining the pumps etc) I'll start to erode my ability to make money as the ship's ability to carry oil is reduced (can't carry it if I can't pump it to/from shore) and if I leave it long enough I'll need a new tanker (massive expenditure, wholesale replacement and no deliveries).