Innovation at the Speed of Customers vs. Technical Debt.

Last night, a Karmaback customer asked for the impossible.  Around 6pm EST, I got a message asking how our new Social Coupons can support % rather than just $ discounts... he wanted it right then.  He said simply "how do I do this?".  Well, one answer would be "you can't".  Karmaback's answer, though was, "hold on a second...  let me build it."  That's speed of customer.  Less than 15 minutes later, you could.

How did we do it?  Do we have an army of programmers?  Is it such a trivial thing?  No, and No.  We do it because we have almost zero "Technical Debt."  So adding a feature, by just 1 programmer, can take 15 minutes.  Even when that feature touches 7 different files, including templates and web-pages.

Consider, every time you "don't comment" or you "hack it together", you incur Technical Debt, or stuff you will have to do later... cleanup.  We all know cleanup almost never gets done, so the debt piles up.  Some companies have literally man-years worth of technical debt.  Their entire software has been "kludged" together.

Now consider when  you do it right.  You take the time to "architect, plan, comment, code, test".  You have no technical debt, and you can Innovate at the Speed of Customers!