Earlier today I fixed the broken style sheets on my old Python based Pelican blog. My reading list this week is mostly about How to measure developer productivity in this AI era and I stumbled an old draft post that I had written ~ 2 years ago.
That draft post itself distilled from a tweet that I then wanted to reflect to my own’s team challenges.
In the fast‑moving world of product development, it’s easy to feel like you’re always on the back‑burner, firefighting problems that never reach the outside world. The above-mentioned tweet set the stage for a deeper introspection: we’re not just dealing with technical debt; we’re struggling to keep up with pace, to balance speed against engineering best practices, and to coordinate across teams without blocking on feedback.
The Speed‑Quality Dilemma
| Issue | Why it Matters | Typical Response |
|---|---|---|
| Rapid releases | Customers expect quick fixes. | “Do it fast, fix later.” |
| Engineering hygiene | Long‑term maintainability and reliability. | “We’ll do a clean‑up sprint later.” |
| Trade‑off confusion | Misunderstanding what “right” looks like in a given situation. | “Let’s pick one approach and stick with it.” |
My team’s core frustration was that we could not be fast enough while simultaneously preventing a flood of hidden, low‑visibility firefighting tasks. The root cause? A lack of clear decision‑making frameworks and a culture that treats quick fixes as “good enough” without a systematic evaluation.
In the next post, I will write in detail how we solved our team’s internal challenge.
Princiya Sequeira 
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