I agree with your final sentence that businesses often undertake very ill-advised software projects. However I don't think the building analogy is very illumin

I agree with your final sentence that businesses often undertake very ill-advised software projects. However I don't think the building analogy is very illuminating here; the thing about buildings is that while they have complexity, the costs, benefits and use cases are a lot more intuitive and can be explained to an FP&A professional who can use pretty standard methods to project potential outcomes across a wide range of projects. Software is not like this as there is no limit to the scope that can be built in to a single app. You don't have the constraints of physical space, materials and human use cases and locality. The "load-bearing" aspects of software are not just physical infrastructure with CPU/memory limits, but also fundamental choices in the data model, some things more than others, and what starts out as a casual choice can become load bearing if further construction builds on that assumption. Buildings don't have legacy data. > When you create a coffee shop, you build it to have a specific, repeatable, singular user experience. I can't tell if you're suggesting software should be built this way, but after 25 years in the consumer space in multiple startups, scaleups, and largish companies, I have never seen any software company succeed based on rigidly adhering to singular user experience in this way. Even when you can describe the experience simply, the details and tradeoffs are enormous, and companies that win are the ones that are able to iterate quickly without letting the quality degrade to the point that the wheels come off. Facebook vs Friendster vs MySpace is a pretty good example. In my own founding experience, I was able to bootstrap a streaming service to 6-figure subscribers over 8 years leaving behind a graveyard of failed competitors because they couldn't thread the needle between good UX, good engineering, and the right content investment. I'm sure it's different in well established and standardized corners of B2B and industrial software where you are not subject to the fickle nature of consumers, but in B2C you are default-dead if you insist on some kind of fixed requirement and long-term vision that doesn't change.