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It is incredibly easy to design for growth when looking in a rear view mirror. For example, it is easy NOW to see that Twitter's problem was scaling, and that t
by raganwald 15y ago
It is incredibly easy to design for growth when looking in a rear view mirror. For example, it is easy NOW to see that Twitter's problem was scaling, and that they should have planned to grow their scalability while evolving their user experience.
However, at the time it might have gone the other way: Perhaps their user base and volume might have increased at a slower place, leaving plenty of time to evolve their scalability, while their user experience might have required relentless change.
In which case, they should have planned for their user experience to "scale" rather than their infrastructure.
- eropple 15y agoTrue. That said, designing for scalability isn't that hard, and does not take that much more time than just bunging out whatever comes first to mind.
- jshen 15y agoYou're assuming that you know ahead of time what the bottlenecks are, and more importantly, which trade offs to make, because scaling is almost always about trade offs. A scalable solution is usually a more rigid solution as well, and that can be a problem for a startup that may need to try a few ideas before they hit on what works.