Essential Takeaways:
Moving without direction can be the enemy of software development. The three areas where you need to slow down are the product, process, and our own people. Let me start with a story before digging into the details.
I suppose it was 2011. I joined a team responsible for building an internet marketing and promotion platform. My responsibility was to add features to the system. I was a developer. We call developers “senior” when they can grow faster than others, right? When I joined, we found it was impossible to proceed due to design debt and issues. At every attempt, we found the complexity increased and destroyed the quality. It seemed the only approach to gear up was to rewrite the system.
I remember I suggested we needed to rewrite the system and called the product manager. After 30 minutes of silence on the phone, the product manager responded, “You are saying your team wrote your product so poorly that the same team has to rewrite the same product but better this time. Right? Man, it is unacceptable.”