Many organizations fall into the pattern of relentlessly prioritizing the development of new features. While innovation and pushing the boundaries of your product are essential, there’s a subtle yet impactful distinction to be made. It’s the difference between feature development and the often-overlooked operational work that keeps your product alive and thriving.

The Operational Blind Spot

Let’s unpack the common mindset:

  • The allure of the new: It’s exciting to focus on flashy additions that promise growth and competitive advantage. New features feel tangible, making them easy to measure and justify.
  • The “not urgent” fallacy: Operational tasks like bug fixes, infrastructure improvements, and security updates often lack the sense of immediate urgency that new features bring.
  • Invisible foundations: The smooth, behind-the-scenes work that ensures your product’s stability, security, and scalability rarely takes center stage.

Senior leaders may unknowingly perpetuate this cycle. The pressure to ship, innovate, and outperform the competition can inadvertently lead to deprioritizing the operational health of the product. This leads to a dangerous, long-term consequence: the erosion of the product’s foundation.

The Cost of Neglecting Operations

Imagine your product as a high-performance car. Continuously adding performance upgrades, sportier parts, and a dazzling paint job won’t do much good if the engine sputters, tires are worn, and brakes are failing. Here’s what happens when you neglect operational work:

  • Technical debt piles up: Small bugs, inefficiencies, and shortcuts in the codebase accumulate over time. Like an unpaid loan, technical debt accrues interest - making future changes harder and more expensive.
  • Security cracks widen: If security patches and updates get delayed, vulnerabilities become glaring targets for cyberattacks. A single breach can lead to catastrophic losses in revenue and customer trust.
  • User experience crumbles: Performance lags, slow loading times, and frustrating glitches harm customer satisfaction. Users switch to competitors for a more seamless experience.
  • Morale takes a hit: Development teams stuck in a constant firefighting mode of fixing bugs and stability issues become demoralized. Burnout rises, and top talent starts looking elsewhere.

Operational Work is Product Development

A paradigm shift is needed. Leaders need to recognize that operational work is not separate from product development; it is core product development. Here’s a framework:

  • Reliability is a feature: Customers expect your product to be secure, fast, and bug-free. That’s the baseline, not a perk.
  • Resilience is innovation: Your ability to adapt, scale, and respond to security threats is true innovation. It future-proofs your product.
  • Sustainability is growth: A stable foundation for your product gives you the agility to implement those exciting new features. Neglect, and you’ll be bogged down by a fragile system that impedes growth.

How to Foster Operational Excellence

What are some strategies leaders can use?

  1. Make it visible: Include operational health metrics in your product roadmap and high-level dashboards. Track technical debt, security vulnerabilities, and performance indicators alongside feature development.
  2. Incentivize stability: Reward teams who proactively address technical debt, improve performance and bolster security. Make it a celebrated part of development culture.
  3. Budget for the long-term: Allocate specific time and resources for operational work. Don’t just squeeze it in when there’s a crisis.
  4. Communicate the ‘why’:  Articulate to your entire organization that operational excellence is how you protect customer trust and enable sustainable growth.
  5. Empower your teams:  Give developers the authority to schedule time for refactoring, fixing non-critical bugs, and addressing performance problems alongside feature work.

Questions to Guide Healthy Balance

Of course, new features and innovations are crucial. The key is finding the right equilibrium. Here are some questions to guide decision-making:

  • Will neglecting this operational task pose a major risk to our product’s security, stability, or user experience shortly?
  • Does this new feature rely on a part of the codebase riddled with technical debt? If so, is it worth refactoring first?
  • Would delaying this feature by a short time allow the team to significantly improve the overall health and performance of the product?

The Leadership Shift

As a leader, your role is to champion this change in thinking. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

  • Be the voice of reason: When everyone is enthused about a new feature, ask the hard questions about its impact on operational health.
  • Advocate for proactive investment: Make the case for dedicating resources to preventive maintenance rather than always scrambling with emergency fixes.
  • Champion operational excellence culture: Celebrate teams that successfully tackle technical debt and those who find innovative ways to enhance stability and security.

The Rewards of Operational Excellence

By making operational work a strategic priority, you reap tremendous benefits:

  • Enhanced customer trust: Secure and reliable products build a loyal customer base recommending your solution.
  • Accelerated innovation: A stable, well-maintained codebase allows you to implement new features faster and with fewer complications.
  • Lower development costs: Reducing technical debt saves you from expensive rewrites and emergency patching in the future.
  • Happier teams: Developers thrive in an environment where they can build sustainable products and prevent constant firefighting.

Conclusion

The misconception that only new features equate to progress stifles the long-term success of your product. By recognizing that operational work is an integral part of true product development, leaders can set the stage for a healthy balance.  Invest in operational excellence, and you’ll build a product that not only dazzles customers but also withstands the test of time.

How does your organization prioritize operational work? Are you facing the consequences of neglect? Let’s start a conversation about building sustainable, high-quality products together.