Broken Products

Too many consumer facing tech-enabled startups built platforms, but underestimated the engineering talent to support them through phases of growth and maturity. They initially shipped fast but really poor quality product, leading many core flows to be completely broken.

The end result is a platform that is definitively worse than one with just limited/critical features/flows. It leads to terrible business outcomes: erodes customer trust and drastically increases customer support costs.

In relatively mature software systems, maintenance cost is proportional to the complexity of the product. And it’s inversely proportional to the speed by which layers of complexity were tacked-on.

In other words, it is possible to keep maintenance cost low for a complex system — but after a certain point, there is a need to be thorough as you’re building out.

Product quality is and forever will be underrated.