I introduce the kind of customer who needs the Labrary’s advice with the following description:
Your software team was a sight to behold, when it started out. You very quickly got to an MVP, validated its fit with early successes, iterated on the user experience and added the missing features. You hired a few more developers to cover the demand.
Now, things are starting to feel slower. The team insists they’re still continuing apace, but you haven’t kept that initial excitement. Developers are grumbling about technical debt. The backlog keeps growing. Testers aren’t keeping up – despite automation. The initial customers aren’t getting the benefits they first expected, and new customers aren’t being won at the rate you’d like.
The problem was that the way you hit it out of the park worked well in the early days, when you had a green field project and no existing code or customers to support. Now your customers expect all new features and surprising and delightful interactions: but they also expect nothing to change, and certainly not to break. The desired qualities of your software have changed, and so the quality of your software must change.
Plenty of people, typically CTOs and heads of software development, typically at growth scale, identify with this description, so it’s worth digging deeper into how it comes about.
At the early stage, your company has a small team, a vague idea of what the product is, and no customers. Literally anything your engineering team can do will be valuable: it will either be a product that fits the market, or tell you where the market isn’t. Obviously there’s some hand-waving about being able to market and sell whatever it is that your engineering team build, but by and large anything you come up with is somehow useful. You are either defining a new market, in which case all work is market-leading, or entering an established market, in which case your direction is clear. It’s hard to make a wrong decision at this stage, but very easy to stick to one.
And while we all know the horror stories about shipping your prototype to production, it’s actually not a bad plan at this stage. You don’t know what will or won’t work, so getting something out there quickly is exactly the right thing to do. And your developers probably have a base standard of maturity even for prototype projects, so you’ll have version control, some form of testing infrastructure and CI, external libraries for data storage, it won’t be a complete wild west.
Things go, loosely speaking, in one of two directions here. If you fail to find the right customers and the right product, you’re out of money, thanks for playing. If you find the right product for the right people, then congratulations! You get more money, either through revenue or a funding round, and you grow the company. Maybe the programmer you were paying before becomes the CTO, maybe one or two of the contractors you worked with come on as perms, and you get a couple of new people come on in return for an OK salary and the promise of the stock sometime being worth something. One of those people is even a QA!
Of course, the cash injection (particularly if it came as a lump through funding that can be drawn down as necessary) gives you the headroom to do things properly. Technologies are chosen, an architecture is designed (usually just by connecting the technologies with arrows), and an attempt is made to build the new thing, support the old thing, and continue adding new features and differentiate in the market. A key customer demographic is sold the promise of the new system (it being exciting and more capable, at least that is what the roadmap says), takes delivery of the old system (it being ready), then takes up time asking for the new features. You either divert resources from the new system to the old to add the features there, or invent some unholy hybrid where your existing thing makes calls to the new thing for the new features with a load of data consistency glue binding the two together. We’ll call these customers “saps” for now. Also, whether you’ve caught up to your competitors or your competitors to them, you’re now having to maintain an edge.
Let’s take stock here. You have:
- Some saps, giving us actual money, on the old platform.
- Some hope that things will be easier once everything’s on the new platform.
- Pressure to stay ahead of/catch up to the competition in both places.
That’s more work! But it’s OK, you’ve got more people. But where you add to the old system (which pleases your saps) you take away from the new, so tend to favour unintrusive patches rather than deeper changes there. Which makes it harder to understand, and harder to support, which is more work! OK, so hire more people! But now engineering costs more. OK, so sell the original thing (not the new thing, it isn’t ready yet) to a few more customers! But now there are more customers, demanding more features, and more support. OK, so hire more people!
Run through that cycle a few times and you end up in the place I described in the Labrary blurb. You’ve got a big team, filled with capable engineers, working hard, and delivering…not as much as anyone would like. The problem is that working on the software is pulling them away from working for the company. The other problem is that you’re measuring how much the software gets worked on.
