Innovation Debt

Innovation Debt
blog.pbell.com

So what? If you have paying customers and the software "works" this isn't a huge downfall. New, young and challenged developers will gladly follow in the foot steps of seasoned coders before them.

> Recruiting will get harder

This is a problem for every company with developers. As long as you have paying customers, recruiting isn't as big of a problem as people make it out to be. Is this a problem for places like Google and Facebook? Sure. For you start-up, probably not. Software challenges tend to trail off towards the latter part of the software's life cycle. If there is a new piece of functionality required then smart developers will simply find the tools, frameworks, libraries, they need to solve that problem. They don't need this dictated to them.

> Productivity won’t improve

You also are inherently decreasing their productivity by teasing them with new technologies that may never be used. You can also clearly quantify their loss in productivity when they spend time on new technologies. I'd prefer to measure the measurable and manage that, rather than half guess a "innovation debt" that I'll never be able to manage properly.

> Your software will get stale

Are your customers still paying? Good, get over this aspect then. Software that doesn't change always goes stale.

It happens when the team is too busy putting out fires and finishing up features to keep up to date with advances in languages, frameworks, libraries, tools and processes.

What about the increased costs (real actual currency HR costs) that are included in constantly taking your resources off the software maintenance and delivery for a product/service that real people are paying for. There are some serious implications with letting people's innovative brains wander too far when given a specific task to accomplish. This is why hackathons and "FedEx" days are so popular. It's a mutual agreement between employer and employee that says: "You are allowed to hack something together with new exciting technology but I cannot guarantee it will reach the production stack"

I think this idea of innovation debt is a clear non-problem for me and most web based startups in my situation.

While I am very supportive of learning and using cutting edge technologies when it makes sense, it does need to balanced with technical risk assessment, which your post alludes to at the end. For example, say you want to try the Rust language and think it would give you some advantage. Things like maturity / community, etc, definitely come into play.

Innovation comes not just from using new technologies, but also from using new techniques with old boring technologies. I’d even argue that working on cutting-edge problems forces you to innovate, alleviating some of the innovation debt issue (not everybody has that issue).

You can innovate on nonfunctional areas, such as devops, logging, metrics, etc, if your core business needs to be more conservative.

One of the best talks I went to in the last year was by CTO of Etsy, where he talked about how they use “the most boring technologies they can find” – php, mysql, etc. At the same time, Etsy has a very strong reputation in the tech community. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Etsy

I'd probably see if I could start to break off a piece of a system, bring in a consultant or new dev for a couple of months, pair them with one of your team and rotate every few weeks. You won't lose too much capacity in terms of working on the core system and you'll get a chance to start to slowly introduce members of your team to new best practices. Sometimes single page web apps can help with some of this as you can just drop in backbone on a page or two and use it to federate data from both your main app and a new app you're adding some functionality to.

You probably will end up losing half the team over time, but honestly if they put up with the current state of affairs for so long, that might not end up being a bad long term outcome. Just don't big bang any changes - cultural or technical. And try to ignite curiosity rather than "mandating innovation"

Agreed 100% - both with the value of meetups and balancing the technical risk assessment. I'm doing a keynote at NFJS New York on "how to select and adopt technologies" that talks a lot about community focus, where in the technology adoption lifecycle the technology is, etc.

You also have to look out for how many technologies you're managing. I'm a fan of polyglot programming and polyglot persistence, but that doesn't mean you should have five server side languages and seven different NoSQL data stores.

Agreed re: innovating on peripheral apps. Only thing I'd add is select technologies that could be great for your core, innovate peripherally, and once you have some experience you can revisit the risks of introducing that tech into your core stack.

Nice link re: the infoQ etsy talk - thanks!