VP Product at Uplevel | Developer → PM, focused on dev tools | Ex-Sourcegraph, Palantir | Talk to me about developer productivity
I can’t stress enough how important it is for product managers to learn how to balance their tech debt. If you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for a painful journey… Because problems will come up, and when they do, they will spiral out of control if you haven’t built a good foundation, and consistently maintained your product. If you rush to get something out to market, skip proper reviews, and/or neglect code quality, seemingly minor issues will turn into major problems. And if you keep adding new features before addressing these issues, the problems escalate. There may be initial excitement around your product - you may get buy-in from customers - but the second new features get added, the code becomes increasingly complex and error-prone. Bugs pile up, and it’s hard to rewrite or start from scratch. And the more popular your product becomes, the more difficult and time-consuming it is to fix the accumulating tech debt. The team is constantly firefighting, trying to patch issues as they arise, leading to delays in releasing new features and causing frustration among users. All those customers you gained are now complaining…or they’re gone. Take the time to do it right. This is where the product and engineering relationship comes into play. While it can be tempting to add more and more improvements, you have to constantly address the underlying debt incurred. Look for ways to pay down the tech debt incrementally coupled with business value driving efforts.
Technology Transformation Leadership | I help with platform improvements to achieve business goals
7moIt’s inversely proportional to speed to respond to customer opportunities in the future 🙂