Safely fix something that is important, broken, and dangerous as fast as possible. Speed is critical - don't worry about “leaving a scar” on our architecture or business process, just own it and get it done. Solve the problem, do not overbuild.Example: Something incorrect on our public website with more than 100 page views a month should be fixed immediately and not delayed to be done with a longer-term project, such as a website redesign. If the staging server cannot be pushed, this means manually fixing production and duplicating that change on staging, rather than trying to fix staging.
Triage tasks that are important and broken but not dangerous, and fix the most important things with a minimum time and cost. Scarring should be a low-priority consideration – it's fine to leave scars and it's fine to spend a little energy to avoid big ones. Solve the problem for the next stage of growth, but don’t solve it in two to three stages ahead.Example: In Mattermost, spend 2 mana to enable automated messages over 4000 characters to be broken into multiple posts instead of being rejected, which is a problem every developer hits when they attempt to output log information viacurl
commands.
Fix and optimize critical, high volume flows in our customer experience and product with heavy investment if needed to make high impact changes. Scars can be avoided and removed to produce a high impact result.Example: Click-tracking traffic on about.mattermost.com and optimizing flows to direct visitors to learn about the product and downloading it is a flow that should be continually optimized.