Deliver faster and increase quality

What's the most important objective for a tech company?

Deliver products faster and increase their quality over time.

Engineering teams too often focus on the "here and now." Deliver this or that feature quickly and forget it.

More important than these quick wins is how fast you can iterate over product - deliver new value which accelerates growth, enables expansions, decreases costs, or improves customer satisfaction. Very rarely, such things are achieved within the product's first version.

Therefore, work on functionalities must also include platform work. Even if this is only "1% better" - one more bug fixed, one warning tackled, one more task automated - these things add up.

When working on particular features, I encourage teams to think about the work this way:

Try to build a platform that exposes expected functionality rather than creating just this functionality.

The goal is not the feature itself but a better platform that makes the next iteration over features significantly faster.

It's not always an easy thing, but it pays off. Fast iterations mean faster reactions to customers' feedback or other market signals. And this lead to product value growth.