For developers, the teams charged with creating and protecting business value through software, the pressure has never been greater.
The cost to the business bottom line and impact on your engineering teams cannot be overstated.
The Rising Cost of Technical Debt and Security Threats It was an expensive opportunity cost for our startup firm, not to mention the confusion among our customers. That effort tied up about half our engineering and testing resources for another 18 months while the rest of us worked on creative workarounds to keep the existing product relevant. We had no choice but to re-architect the product.
We had allowed ourselves to be dependent on a platform component that was long-scheduled to be retired. Learn more.Īfter about three years into our growth, we hit an impasse. Microsoft Azure supports your workload with abundant choices, whether you're working on a Java app, app server, or framework. But, over time, our focus on features and our early successes obscured us from keeping up with changes in our underlying platform. We assumed that we’d have time to take care of it once we found our footing in the market. We took some shortcuts with the underlying platform roadmap in favor of more feature delivery. A recipe for disaster.įor example, I once worked at a startup where our product owner’s mantra was, “We need to be first and we need to be fabulous.” We were pioneering a new market and it was important to stake a claim. Meaning more feature work, more shortcuts, and more risk and debt. Moreover, the success of getting a product to market before competitors can create even more opportunities to spiral. technical debt) are paused for the sake of getting to market sooner. Architectural and process improvements (a.k.a. So when demand for new features is high-like it is at the moment to support customers in this intensified digital climate-shortcuts are taken. The oncoming of a death spiral may not be obvious to your product teams, as they are generally working flat out on important feature work.
DEATH SPIRAL GW2 SERIES
What is a Death Spiral?Ī death spiral is a series of opportunistic compromises that quietly build up over time to devastating effect. So, now perhaps more than ever, it’s critical that we make wise, data-driven decisions around balancing the need to create new business value while protecting existing business value. While this estimation was made in 2016, we can assume this churn rate is now even higher. And there’s no time to waste by 2027, it’s estimated that 50 percent of the S&P 500 companies will be replaced if they continue on their pre-pandemic trajectory. While serious, especially in a time where customer responsiveness is legacy-defining, the good news is that you can turn it around if you take action now. Every big push to market comes with a percentage of risk and debt that, if neglected for faster-time-to-market and more features, will lead your business into a death spiral. Yet features alone do not define the business success of a digital product. When it comes to supporting customers in a digital-first world, it can be easy for IT and business leaders to think solely about delivering “that” shiny new feature.
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