Re:It’s worth spending weeks on research before wasting year...
by nostrademons on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @04:19PM
(#20629115)
Management debt is when you create social or organizational policies that solve the immediate problem but will create morale, personnel, or legal issues later. The concept comes from an a16z essay:
Other examples might include tolerating an aggressive status-based "brogrammer" culture, institutionalizing long working hours, or instituting gatekeepers that can block launches to avoid specific issues that have bitten you in the past.
I've worked at two startups that were killed by technical debt, and founded one. The way it usually manifests is that the startup fails to get to product/market fit before the complexity of its codebase prevents any further progress. These failures usually happen early in the startup's lifecycle (before many people have heard about them) and are often chalked up to failure to find a market, but the reality is often that if they could've iterated in days instead of months they would've found a winning product. Frequently a competitor started a few years later comes in with a simpler approach, leveraging building blocks that have already gotten mainstream vetting, and takes the market. (For more prominent examples, there's projects like General Magic, Apple Copland, Windows Longhorn, Chandler, and Friendster.)
https://a16z.com/2012/01/19/management-debt/
Other examples might include tolerating an aggressive status-based "brogrammer" culture, institutionalizing long working hours, or instituting gatekeepers that can block launches to avoid specific issues that have bitten you in the past.
I've worked at two startups that were killed by technical debt, and founded one. The way it usually manifests is that the startup fails to get to product/market fit before the complexity of its codebase prevents any further progress. These failures usually happen early in the startup's lifecycle (before many people have heard about them) and are often chalked up to failure to find a market, but the reality is often that if they could've iterated in days instead of months they would've found a winning product. Frequently a competitor started a few years later comes in with a simpler approach, leveraging building blocks that have already gotten mainstream vetting, and takes the market. (For more prominent examples, there's projects like General Magic, Apple Copland, Windows Longhorn, Chandler, and Friendster.)