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Agreed, and this is where I think some more nuanced and conscious use of tech debt can be used when applicable.

It might be OK to place some bets on an initiative or feature, but if we all understand we're placing a bet, this is an area to load up on debt and really minimize the investment. This also requires an org that is mature about cutting the feature if the bet doesn't materialize, and if the market signal is generated will reinvest in paying down the debt. And also has the mega-danger territory of a weak market signal, where it's not clear if there is market signal or not, so the company doubles down into the weak signal.

Also these bets shouldn't be done in isolation in my view, well executed product and market discovery should also provide lots of relevant context on the ROI.

by RamblingCTO1 days ago|

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Totally agreed! I think good orgs that run well have a good feedback process and ownership between the individual teams. In my experience, the closer they work together, the more visible the impact is on ROI. The less context everybody has, the higher the risk that an initiative goes sideways and doesn't fully match the intent.

And yeah, cutting features and offloading debt is important. I love that part when starting an engagement! It's a bit of work to check critical execution paths and how customers actually use a product, but it's a good excercise for everybody to see the relationship between revenue and code.

This all sounds easy and in reality it's not the hardest, but for some reason no one is doing it.