100% this. Tackling a real problem > Having a big addressable market > Good product / UX > Great Engineering. Strictly. Great Engineering pays back at a much

100% this. Tackling a real problem > Having a big addressable market > Good product / UX > Great Engineering. Strictly. Great Engineering pays back at a much larger time scale and makes for an enabler or a breaker at the critical scaling stage only. You can get surprisingly far with a protoduction service and still build something huge (see Twitter). Great design is atomic and homogenous. Weak technology leadership ends up in opening up a vacuum that gets filled by Architecture Astronauts (Etsy), every team doing their own thing technologywise (SoundCloud), or at the very worst, some dogmatic homebrew NIH stack (various places I‘ve worked at). Every unhealty Technology organization looks unhealthy in its own way, but the great ones look all alike: Clean, simple, rather homogenous and logical.