Time to Market and Russian tanks in WW2.
How Russian tanks won World War II by being on time at the Right Time to Market. We call it technical debt.
World War II ended in 1945, but it may have been decided during the winter of 1942. It is known as the Battle of Stalingrad and ended with the destruction of the 4th and 6th Wermacht armies.
The best battle tanks of World War II were the German Panther and the Tiger. Both recognized as the perfect weapons ever built till that time moment.
The Tiger II is considered one of the best tanks in history, but they ran out of gas and perished in the face of the primitive Russian T-34s.
The Russians built at unprecedented speed the most significant number of tanks during the war. From the old T-26s tested in the Spanish Civil War, the engineer Mikhail Khoskin reconverted the Kharkow factory to make the prodigy that made the war pivot. All that was required was agility and armor. Those tanks would have rusted in 1946, but what would it matter? The war would have been over by then. Later with time and resources, they were able to build the IS-2s that dominated the fronts of Europe.
Perfectionism was defeated by agility. The best products sometimes languish, overwhelmed by good enough ones on their way to being better. And there is a difference between solving a problem perfectly or handling it decently enough. If time and opportunity are going to be excessive, your perfection is too expensive. Someone else will take advantage of your perfectionism. I’m afraid you didn’t understand that there was something in Finance called Technical Debt.
Technical Debt in financial terms is the balance between decisions that allow something to happen in the short term versus those that would enable it to be sustainable in the long term.
If you analyze it in an Excel spreadsheet to the letter, it fits as Debt. Still, you can’t fit everything in life into an Excel spreadsheet. It will lead you to make the worst decisions, albeit impeccable accounting decisions. It can be the greatest possible deception as a business vision because it will make you arrive very neat but very late to the party. Time to Market would have made your competition arrive earlier.
Putting off complex problems to not die early can be a solution when you don’t yet have the resources. It is the never-ending story about the day-to-day life of start-ups that never grow up. It is as attractive as it is challenging to work in a company of shifting balances. But not as difficult as achieving success in a wholly balanced company.
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