Shipping products fast should be the #1 tech leaders' priority.
Why?
Your competition isn't another startup anymore.
It's the next AI API update that can kill your product and make it obselete.
Facts:
OpenAI ships major updates every 4-6 weeks. Anthropic just dropped computer use. Google's Gemini 2.0 rewrote the rules on multimodal AI.
Your "innovative feature" might be a deprecated commodity by the time you ship it.
The companies winning right now aren't the ones with the best plans.
They're the ones who can pivot in a sprint, not a quarter.
We've shifted our entire development philosophy:
- 2-week build cycles (max)
- Assume every AI capability will 10x in 60 days
- Build for composability, not completeness
- Ship, test, kill, repeat.
The hardest part? Letting go of the beautiful architecture you designed last month.
The best part? You're building products that actually matter today, not six months ago.
The only sustainable strategy is uncomfortable adaptability.
Top comments (1)
Absolutely this. Built 36 products in the last year and the ones that survived weren't the most polished - they were the ones shipped fast enough to iterate based on real user feedback.
Your point about AI API updates is critical. I've killed 3 features mid-development because OpenAI's next release made them commodities. The shift to "build for composability, not completeness" is exactly right - assume every foundation will change in 60 days.
The hardest lesson: perfect architecture from last month is technical debt this month. Ship, learn, pivot.