The tech industry glorifies speed. Yet moving fast all the time will inevitably result in more damage than good. Some decisions, especially in tech, can be reversed easily. Others will haunt you for years. The real dangers aren’t in picking the wrong framework but in the structural decisions—people, teams, offerings—that create organizational drag.
The Long Shadow of Bad Hires
Your hiring process shouldn’t be 100% foolproof. If you only bring in hires that you are sure of, you’ll likely end up cloning your organization and miss out on some great hires. That said, some hires have a far greater risk of derailing your organization.
For example, every senior leadership role should be treated with the right seriousness and not something you rush into because the current one is leaving or because “your board told you” (I hear that too often). I’ve seen companies bring in a VPE that, without exaggeration, wasted the equivalent of 50% of Engineering’s time, resulted in key hires leaving, and created lasting damage on the organization’s culture that often took over a year to fix. Some of them were efficient enough to do that in a span of a quarter.
That’s before calculating in the cost of the “optics” when you had to replace key hires, what the mental drain and extra effort to refill the position cost, and myriad other reasons. Stop moving too fast.
Organizational Debt
Tech debt is a joke compared to org debt. As I explained in this video, org debt cripples startups much sooner than tech debt usually does. How do we quickly rake up this debt? When we “move fast” and make structural decisions without considering them properly. Refactoring code after the fact is just a matter of time investment. Fixing decisions that affect people requires a lot more effort, can have great costs, and, depending on regulation, might even be impossible for months.
Rather than rush into promoting people, moving things around just to “retain” someone, and other feats that befit a contortionist and not your org chart, take a breather. The headache you’re trying to circumvent right now might become worse to undo once there are lots of egos involved. More often than not, we can start by framing something as a temporary experiment (one of the best leadership hacks in TEOS).
Unprofitable Software
The concept is that software is supposed to be insanely profitable. That’s because the marginal cost of any additional customer should go down with time. However, it’s extremely common to see startups that make that quite hard to achieve while they were busy rushing forward in the name of moving fast.
As explained in the profitable engineering ebook (and also here), often we can end up creating engineering organizations and software offerings that aren’t going to be profitable. For example, when you put aside for years the leaps required to enable the product to scale without requiring headcount to grow linearly (how many “AI” or “ML” startups had battalions of analysts and students doing manual data entry?). What about SaaS contracts that essentially turn you into a professional services firm, or that complicate any change you’ll do from this day forward, multiplied by every big client your sales people sign?
Running for too long into the unprofitable path can be a death-sentence to a startup, because there always comes the point where the change will require such a massive change in the company and its culture that it’s almost impossible to pull off. In addition, the cash flow from these unprofitable offerings can create a false sense of security, leading the company to rely on it for too long.
Biz-Tech Misalignment
Another problem that’s hard to recover from is when we allow the tech org drift apart from the business. Sometimes it’s set apart from the very first moment, often by tech executives who see themselves as plain executors. They wait to be told what to do, and are content delivering fast. What about being a peer and ensuring your organization genuinely groks the business and its needs?
I’ve heard of so many cases where the board decided on deals and collaborations that make no sense technologically, or went in directions that, had they given tech enough notice and involved them, could’ve been achieved much faster or with a lower cost. Once this distance is established, it can be near-impossible to change, and too often I’ve seen it solved only after a few key leaders were replaced, allowing a “reset” of the relationships. You don’t want to be there.
Blob Management
When your leadership takes no defined form. You’re all doing the managerial equivalent of flailing your hands in the air, throwing things on the wall and hoping something sticks. Surely some people will succeed in that environment—despite your best efforts to deter them—but how many won’t?
Management must be intentional and treated as a profession in the company. People need to get regular coaching and growth attention. Otherwise, you might get short term results at the cost of losing out on so much longer-term growth of your team. That’s talent inflation right there. If you want to get started, the easiest way is to check out this free ebook on installing the impact coaching framework.
Innovation Stagnation
Lastly, an organization that doesn’t exercise its creativity muscle will see it atrophy really fast. How many mature startups do you know that have become reminiscent of “big tech” when they still have 70% of the initial innovative cohort that started it all internally? The people are there, but having let go of innovation, they lost their mojo.
When you start focusing on delivery and kill all wiggle room to allow innovation to take place, you’re uprooting your org’s ability to ever easily get back at it. Innovation has to be a habitual occurrence and continuously maintained. Creativity cannot be caged for months. I highly recommend installing intermissions, as explained in this free sample chapter.