User Experience Above All Else

Too often I'm joining teams, meetings, hacks, that the center of focus is the technology implementation.

STOP!!!!!

The tech really does not matter. In fact, the tech can suck royally as long as the user experience is great. When I say suck, it could be the ugliest code, hard to maintain, crappy platform, but if the UX works and it takes off - then you worry about the right technology.

Just as you should not pre-tune your app for things like caching, or other expectations that "might" happen, same for the back-end tech.

Make it simple, make it work, make it nimble, make it focus on the primary UX that you need to get that feedback and get you on a path.

Once you start building that momentum, then start focusing on elegance. If you thought about being nimble, then you should've had a proper DevOps story in place from the beginning. Because at first and forever after that, it's about getting a continuous feedback loop that helps you keep focus on what matters to your users. And you can also find out what sucks or isn't being used.

Now that you have that flow going, then start introducing your elegant code and having those "curly braces on new line" conversations.