Recently while helping a client debug and improve a years-broken, obsolete, tangled mess of an infrastructure configuration, one of the teammembers said “I’m hyped that we’re making progress on this! Up to now, we’ve not had the bandwidth, because we’ve been focused 100% on feature work!”

I hear these stories all the time.

Often management won’t “let” developers work on infrastructure or technical debt issues, because features are “more important.”

Sometimes the devs themselves choose this focus, for any number of reasons. Some more legitimate than others.

But the sad thing is, whatever the reason, it’s virtually always misguided.

As Gene Kim, co-other of The Phoenix Project says:

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.

If technical debt, infrastructure work, or anything else is ever slowing down your “100% feature” work, as it has been for years on this team, it’s always worth it to dedicate some time to improving those things.

As slow as this particular team has been operating, I can confidently say that if, at any point in the past 3 years, this team had dedicated, say, 3 months of time to 100% improving their infrastructure, it would have paid for itself by allowing faster delivery of features afterward.

Don’t let the desire for delivering customer value prevent you from making value delivery faster!