Could there be a hybrid approach? Have teams that focus on being a first mover and shipping and then once there's a product on the market, you have a secondary team focusing on fixing the tech debt early while the other team continues to iterate
Paying back the debt, he said, usually requires too much knowledge of a system to cycle teams in and out consistently enough to ensure everyone gets a piece of the new versus the old to keep them engaged.
Whether or not that was backed up by hard data, I'm not sure. It was an interesting angle I hadn't previously thought of though.
As someone who found themself in the "holding the fort" team, I can confirm that this analysis is at least anecdotally true, although the terms I preferred at the time for the two teams were Morlocks and Eloi.
Very true. The good performers will be “rewarded” doing the things that are really important: keeping things going. And then you have low performers and interns doing the new stuff.
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.
There’s not an easy fix though, as most of the time I see orgs just punt at some point and allow the dev shop to write off all their tech debt by reassigning responsibility to an ops team.