The V1 Trap
Why "let's ship to get feedback" is often a euphemism for creating unmanageable technical debt.
One of the scariest sentences in software engineering is: “Let’s focus on getting the first version out and get feedback.”
It often translates to:
“I am going to deliver a technical artifact that functionally works but where I took many trade-offs that reduce future productivity or optionality. Probably I am planning to get recognition for the visibility that hitting a milestone provides, while changing teams or companies and leaving someone else the cost of repairing the system structure and increasing its quality.”
The Feedback Trap
And the feedback does come. Users love it. They want more. Leadership is thrilled—now let’s double down: 10 new features, integrations, scale.
But the team that shipped V1 in 6 weeks? They’re now taking 6 weeks per feature. Then 8. Then 12. Every change fights against the shortcuts baked into the foundation. The system wasn’t built to evolve—it was built to exist once.
Leadership gets frustrated. “Why are we so slow? We used to ship fast.”
The answer is: you shipped fast once. It wasn’t renewable velocity, it was borrowed velocity—and now the debt is compounding.
The Silent Burn
This is how tech debt becomes shareholder value burned in silence.
- Not in dramatic outages, but in the slow death of momentum.
- In the roadmap that keeps slipping.
- In the engineers who burn out because everything is a slog.
The problem isn’t shipping fast. The problem is an incentive system that rewards the visible act of creation and ignores the invisible act of stewardship.
V1 is not an achievement. V1 that doesn’t slow V2 to a crawl is.