On Tech Debt and Architecture
Heads-up that One to Ten will be dropping in about a month. I’ll soon be reaching out to you (via substack, email, linkedin) to help support the book via a review or by spreading the word. More on this to come! In the meantime, tech debt and architecture have been on my mind of late.
Every startup has tech debt to overcome on the path from 1 to 10 and beyond. As CEO, one of your toughest calls will be to determine how much resource to spend on paying down debt and re-architecting the platform to scale vs new feature development that can help you win customers and make quarters. Or you can throw money at it and do both in parallel at the cost of runway.
Startups chasing growth and new logos tend to over-invest in new features and underinvest in retiring technical debt. This debt inevitably catches up causing them to blow up their roadmap or worse. We ran head-straight into this during the hyper-growth years at Brightcove. I interviewed Tareef for the book and he had one of the best metaphors as to how to think about tech debt:
We built a four bedroom house. We were able to fit ten people inside. It was starting to get crowded. Fast forward a few quarters and we had to fit a hundred people on that same plot. It doesn’t mean that the first house was poorly constructed but, at that point, we needed an apartment complex.
What I like about the metaphor is that it acknowledges that a prior version was built with certain design centers in mind - speed, cost, amount of capacity to support. These priors may need updating based on growth and that may need an entirely new foundation to be laid, and infrastructure to be placed to support scale.
So plan to pay down tech debt during the 1 to 10 phase. That doesn’t mean stopping new development to focus on retiring all debt. It does mean baking it into your roadmap even if it means making hard tradeoffs.