This is a line from a blog post written by my brother in law Jerry Solomon. He is talking about film production, specifically short form videos. But the point is true of all projects, from designing a building, a home, a film, an art project, a hardware project, a software project, or whatever.
The design process is relatively inexpensive. The build process is not.
In the kinds of companies we invest in the “development” work comes from the product organization. The “production” work comes from the engineering team.
I have seen engineering teams spin their wheels and burn through countless hours of writing code that ends up getting tossed out just because the design process was not right or not specific enough or not thought through enough.
While we might think these issues and challenges are unique to the world of tech, software, internet, and mobile, the truth is these issues pervade everywhere you are making something.
This is not so applicable to a startup trying to find product market fit. But it becomes very relevant once your company starts to scale. A commitment to thinking things through, getting it right at the start, and being efficient in the “production” process is something all great companies figure out how to do. It’s really important.
