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by montagg 2113 days ago
Early on, I don't think so. You need all hands on deck to move fast. But I do think you need to start establishing those Good Habits way earlier than they might be immediately valuable. For example, getting good at product and technical documentation before you have a huge company. It's so much harder to establish those habits with more people, so you want to have that built in so new folks join, and doing that stuff right is just part of the culture. A little effort today saves a ton of effort to establish those habits later. You also end up with more flexibility: Person A doesn't need to constantly support Feature A because they built it and they're the only one who knows how it works, so you're getting more value out of their time.

In the long-term, I do think product-wide you always have teams at different levels of maturity. Some know more about the problems they're solving and how best to solve them, others know less. Some will move fast, some will build to last. The more a team knows about their problem, or the more a problem cuts across teams, the more I think they should build to last, so investment in those areas scales over a large group or important areas of the business.