Worse is Better for Startups

What’s winning in your technology business? Customers or technology? Image credit: blackillustrations.com

Engineers love to deal in absolutes. We are trained for it, when we study mathematics, electronics and disciplines like finite element analysis or software development at University. It seems to us like everything in the world can be reduced to ones-and-zeroes, true and false.

Business is not like that. You have to prioritise. It is a constant balancing act. Every time you choose to execute on an initiative, there is an opportunity cost. What you spent on those cool infrastructure as code scripts means you are not delivering the incremental login feature that your customers need.

So how do you as a technical leader — say a CTO — explain or understand this balancing act, and make sure your startup or scale up survives? You can say:

Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough.

Or:

The solution that shipped is better than the solution that didn’t.

The next level up the mastery tree is the deeper knowledge that these ideas are not about compromising. Those trite aphorisms leave engineers thinking they are being asked to lower quality to get a delivery out.

Great technical leadership understands that Worse is Better actually means a “worse” solution is often a superior option. That’s what I hope to show in this article. The “compromising…