I’d bet there are as many stories of businesses failing because of inability to ship quickly as there are about focusing too much on your tooling instead of delivering value to customers. Both failures are dangerous! And depending on your market, product, team etc. a different spot on that spectrum is appropriate.
In some places shipping quickly is part of the value. In others, the product works and delivers value and having slow releases (implying eg a manual release process) is a feature.
What this article advocates for is certainly a valid lens, by IMO it’d be a mistake to take it as universal.
I worked at a startup that was briefly a unicorn and ended up burning cash because they did exactly what you said of focusing a lot on tooling and dev environment. It was great but way over the top for what we needed. I learned a lot of good practices for myself but they've been limping along for a while and most of my former team was laid off or saw what was coming and left before it hit them.
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I’d bet there are as many stories of businesses failing because of inability to ship quickly as there are about focusing too much on your tooling instead of delivering value to customers. Both failures are dangerous! And depending on your market, product, team etc. a different spot on that spectrum is appropriate.
In some places shipping quickly is part of the value. In others, the product works and delivers value and having slow releases (implying eg a manual release process) is a feature.
What this article advocates for is certainly a valid lens, by IMO it’d be a mistake to take it as universal.
I worked at a startup that was briefly a unicorn and ended up burning cash because they did exactly what you said of focusing a lot on tooling and dev environment. It was great but way over the top for what we needed. I learned a lot of good practices for myself but they've been limping along for a while and most of my former team was laid off or saw what was coming and left before it hit them.