To Scale or not to Scale?
I got two somewhat contradictory stories dumped into my reading list today. First, Matthew Moore, the CTO at Popular Pays posted this article in our Chicago CTO Slack channel:
Startup CTO — Premature Scaling
Among many pearls of wisdom was,
The moment that you start implementing the latest high performance technology as used by Google or Facebook or whoever, you start locking in assumptions about your business and overall proposition that are probably wrong…
On the flip side, I saw this post from the founders of Algolia:
How the founders of Algolia think about scale
It’s important to have infrastructure growth in mind from the minute you start…
On the product side, it’s important to think two, three or even five iterations ahead. To do so, think about your product, your competition and even your peers and focus on two or three big differentiators to have in your pipeline.
So which is it? Should startup CTOs think about scaling? Should we just be completely pragmatic and build only the features directly in front of us?
It’s a hard balance to strike, and there’s not one right answer. Every startup, team, and time is different. My favorite pearl of wisdom for these kinds of questions comes from Camille Fournier:
No matter what, the CTO must understand where the biggest technical opportunities and risks for the business are and focus on capitalizing on them…
The CTO must protect the technology team from becoming a pure execution arm for ideas without tending to its own needs and its own ideas.
What do you think? Have you had times when you prioritized the short-term product needs over the long-term technical challenges you may face? Let me hear your story.
