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by lochlan 3150 days ago
How was technical debt not one of the things mentioned? In my experience that’s by far the #1 reason for poor velocity.
1 comments

Edited out for space, mostly :)

My target audience is founders of very early-stage startups, so I cut the section under the assumption that they probably won't have much technical debt yet.

Speaking as someone who has worked as a developer for multiple early-stage startups, the opposite is true.

Early-stage startups tend to have rampant technical debt for two reasons:

1) They need to get a product to market immediately and they need to iterate on it rapidly—so using technical debt as a tool to achieve short-term goals quickly is actually awesome.

2) Startups tend to pivot. Making fundamental domain changes to a product quickly tends to give you very weird systems, often with large unused portions.