Clearing the Cache: Can We Overcome Tech and Design Debt?

So I'm in my typical afternoon post work rage. I mean, I have to say it's not work related, but still, give it to me. You know how dependent we are on our mobile phones and on our like being constantly connected. Have you tried to be a day without your phone? No, Alex, never, never thought of that. Yeah, I do. I do. Of course. I mean, how often do you stay without a phone for? I honestly just two weeks ago spent a whole day outside without my phone. And I just realized how nice it is. So a friend was texting me before and asked me to come over and I said, Hey, I'm coming over, but I'm not bringing my phone. So I will stand in front of your apartment. I will ring. And if you don't open, I will go back home because I can't call you. I mean, back in the days, we would just like stop by a friend's place and see if they're home. Yeah, yeah, true. Right. I mean, back in the days, I'm not that old. Right. I'm talking elementary school where, yeah, still phones weren't a thing. So I would just stop at a friend or I would knew all the home phone numbers from all my friends off top of my head. Yeah, yeah. So just call them and be like, Hey, friend, I still know them. I still know some numbers. Yeah. I don't. That's terrible, actually. But yeah, I didn't choose to be without phone or at least without the Internet, I have to say. I was forced to be without the Internet, and I felt the desperation just like when walking Nemo and being like outside and not having any potential distraction or way to communicate with the outside world. I mean, it's kind of sad, but so. Let me tell you this thing. My phone provider, for whatever technical problem reason they are having, didn't extend my contract. So what they did, they suddenly just like put me into my normal pay as pay what you use and megabytes can be quite expensive. So I burned through like 200 bucks in a day. And I mean, it's obviously one of their technical problems, right? I mean, they fucked it up. And now I'm trying to get this contract activated again. It's almost impossible. Their customer support, guess what? If I'm not on my contract, I don't have a flat rate. So I need to pay the phone call to their customer support. And as I called them, their like waiting time is 45 minutes. I'm not going to spend another 100 euros to talk to them and try to solve the problem. I mean, that's that's ridiculous. Fucking hell. Who does that? Then they have a chat. The chat lands on a 404 page. I mean. What phone provider is that Alex? I think we need to publicly shame them. I mean, it's a sub brand of one of the big German ones, right? It's a sub brand of Telefonica. And it's I mean, it's a little bit my fault because I have this like struggle to commit, which is also why I'm not married yet, who knows? But like, I never wanted to have these contracts where you're like fixed there for like years. I want to have something that you can cancel every month. But usually those the big brands don't really have those good contracts. So you get to the smaller ones and it's like those cheap sub brands that you probably can also get at a supermarket. Well, I'm not proud of that, but still, man, the experience was so fucking ridiculous and still is, right? Like I have no Internet. But how do you fix the problem now? I have no idea. I wrote them an email. It's probably somewhere in their email backlog and it takes them another 24 days. I would call them and would tell them, hey, after 45 minutes of waiting, I would tell them, hey, go fuck yourself. I'm not paying this call. I mean, the thing is, it's just they are charging it from my bank account. I'm not afraid to touch my phone. But are they charging it daily? No. Right at the end of the month. No, it's like, so it's I mean, I probably shouldn't go too deep into this rabbit hole that the thing is, like they just like charge in 10 years. So they keep charging 10 years, 10 years, 10 years, 10 years, 10 years, constantly from your bank account. So that's kind of their threshold in the charge of 10 bucks. I'm like, just, you know, you have my bank account. Just charge my fucking contract. Let me use my phone. Yeah, I'm cool. I'm their client since I looked it up since 10 years. And you know what? I'm just waiting for them to get back to me with an email. Give me my money back. And the next day I quit. Fuck you. I mean, that's that's fucking ridiculous. On the other hand, I think that's maybe a good foundation to negotiate an even better deal. Yeah. But I don't want to deal with them. Yeah. I would just tell them, hey, if you don't give me the money back, I will change provider. And the second I get the money back, I change provider. As long as I don't lose my phone number. I love my phone number. Yeah. I don't know it in my head, but I do. I'm just picking up my phone to look up your phone number. No, I love it. There's a lot of sentimental value in there. So, okay. Okay. To me, just random number. So from a product perspective, Alex, what do you say? I mean, already the fact that when I opened their app, they say, hey, it could be that what we're displaying in the app might be wrong because we're currently like fixing some stuff. Yeah. I mean, their product isn't good. Their product was like just like web view of their website in an app. So I'm even surprised. Like usually Apple doesn't approve apps that are just like loading, like where most content is being loaded from the page, from your website. I mean, honestly, I'm still surprised how underdeveloped certain products are, right? I mean, we're living in 2024. I can at least expect that you have like, I mean, kind of native app running, which I can build by myself on a fucking app builder for 20 bucks a month, right? I mean, that's not cool. But, but, and I should not say but, and this is actually a good entry point into the conversation that I wanted to bring because beyond being annoyed at my phone provider, I will survive. I definitely will. I have good Wi-Fi everywhere I go. No, actually, like the one thing, and you just said, right, it's sad that in 2024, there's still shitty companies out there that don't manage to get to build an app. I was generally thinking over the last couple of weeks and months of the actual or of the current state of technology, of companies, of products, right? And so let me just put out my thought and then we can take it from there. I mean, the thing is, most of the big companies are now how old, like somewhere between 10, 15, 20 years. I mean, when was, when did Facebook launch, Facebook, Wikipedia, even with a typo. I mean, Facebook was launched in 2004. So 20 years. 20 years. Yeah. And I mean, if you look back, right, back in the days, technology wasn't that developed. The roles like product managers and product designers almost didn't exist. It was a little bit like this niche thing of like nerds doing their thing and passionate people using it, like techies using tech products and so on. Now, obviously we had this massive boom over the last 20 years as well, right? With all these companies growing massive, thousands and hundreds of thousands of employees. The interesting thing is that I see with all companies, small and big, the amount of tech debt that they have and that they acquired over the years, especially because practices have been that good and so on. I mean, there are certain legacy systems around where I'm just like wondering, like if something ever crashes in there, it's fucking crazy. It will not crash. It will not crash. Do you know why? Because it's old and running. It's not getting ever changed. So I knew an engineer who told me, I'm not sure if it's true. So to every engineer who's tuning in right now, please correct me if I'm wrong. But you know, the ATMs, especially from the older banks in Germany, I think they are running on Windows 95 or older. And a quote from a software engineer that I loved was, the world is running on shit. Isn't that crazy? Or isn't that scary? Right? Yeah. I mean, do you remember when was it? I think it actually was like early 2000s when we moved from, yeah, it was early 2000s, when we moved from 1999 to 2000s, where a ton of computers, ATMs and so on completely broke down because they just never thought about changing to the 2000s. But the good thing is that we have now another 976 years where they will not crash again. It won't be that that fucks us up, but I mean, it's crazy. And I feel like we're spending so much energy to maintain and support these old legacy systems, especially the large companies. I mean, I had the opportunity to see some of the back office applications that Amazon has. That's scary. And there is so many. I can't imagine. There is so many. Oh, you download the CSV there and you upload it there and it's not syncing across the different databases. It's, I mean, it's crazy. And I do feel like a lot of the time we've been just building and with we, I talk about humanity, we've just been building random stuff because it worked without really understanding it. And there is a ton of engineers out there that build stuff by going to stack exchange and just like copy pasting code until it works. There's a lot of designers who build tools just because they see it somewhere else. And there is like this legacy building up on piling up on top of it. Totally. But I mean, that's so, I mean, there's, there's not so much more to say to that, right? That was just like a thought, but yeah. But I just want to, to add up on what you're saying because not only tech, we don't have only tech debt. We also have design debts, for example, especially when we look at back office applications, right? I mean, I have seen in every company I and we've worked together, right? I mean, look at the back office applications, they're fucked up. But also, I mean, look at the company. I think we talked about it as well in one of our previous episodes. Let's take a company like Facebook. Have you ever tried to create a Facebook ad account and create a Facebook pixel to track the traffic on your, I mean, it's, it's not only impossible, almost, it's the worst user experience, the worst fucking design, the worst fucking, I don't know, CTA namings that I've ever seen in my entire life. And you know what the thing is? So these companies stand for, at least they were standing for design thinking, design forward thinking, product experience, at least back in the days, right when everything started. They were all, or they are all engineering lads and founded companies, right? I think. Fair point. I mean, they've, they've, they've always missed that, but obviously like, I think, and that's, that's a little bit the problem also when I look at designers, unfortunately, because those companies are big, people look up to them, right? Like independently. Yeah. And that's the problem. It can be very bad, but they are still like, Oh, that's, that's like a fan company. So we look up to them. One argument is, and that's a fair argument. It's a big company. They are successful and it works. Yeah, yeah, it does. But what was it that made it work, right? Was it their extremely well-written codes, their extremely optimized UX, or was it just like fundamentally a great problem that they were solving or a great idea, right? And that's the point because user experience and behavioral patterns can be trained, right? Let's take the best example is, we always talk about it. Go to the Apple website. I mean, if you look at e-commerce standards and conversion rate optimization, the Apple website is not that conversion rate optimized compared to other crazy online shops, but it works because they've been one of the first who developed obviously great hardware products and people buy it. And, and they don't have to optimize, right? You go to Apple because you want to buy the iPhone. Exactly. I mean, I think every brand should have the ambition to not like use any patterns or dark patterns and promotions and so on to get people to buy, right? And to, to growth hack the way out of it. At the end, I mean, and this is definitely a good thing. There is companies out there where people go, go to those companies because they want a product and then everything else doesn't matter. But at the same time, it's like, why do you buy on Amazon? You buy on Amazon because you know, everything you need is on there and you can get it in 24 hours. Yeah. It doesn't matter that like their, their system, they change UI constantly. Like I'm, I'm, I'm in this position where I sometimes buy stuff for when I'm in Italy and sometimes I buy stuff for when I'm in Germany. Changing countries on the same account, I think in the last two years, they moved it into six different, completely different places from like, Oh, I go to my account. Oh, I go to user. Oh, I go to settings. Oh, I do it from the homepage. Oh, I go to the fifth layer somewhere in the menu. It's like fucking like, it doesn't make sense. But what would make sense? I mean, and I think this is, this is a little bit the question around root cause, right? Is it, is it the fact that we are so religious about maintaining the legacy instead of just like rewriting it? Is it sometimes also an organizational issue of just like having too many people and too many chefs in the, in the kitchen? Are the processes like too complicated to then just like improve it? Is there, is there in the example of Amazon, just like a designer who wants to play around with this button in the hope to find the magic place and not thinking that there are people that have to switch more frequently and if you move it every other week, they can't find it. It's probably a combination of all of these. Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing that comes to my mind also from this typical product manager point of view is not enough business value, right? To fix it or to change it. But the question is how big is the cost of maintenance? And I think it goes a little bit back down to what, what we talked in one of our recent episodes of just like building it from scratch with a smaller team. Take all the learnings you have, start with a proper analysis of, okay, what is the good thing? What is the bad thing? Sit down, have a few people, redo the architecture. You know what you need. You can drop everything else that you implemented as workarounds in the past. You just build it clean. And this is actually something that I really like and want to talk about because, I mean, as you know, I'm also building these days a lot of products myself and I just noticed something. So I think it's fair to say as a company that once you get started with your product, things will become less important to update or to improve the bond, right? Let's say back office applications, for example. And one thing that I've noticed is, and what I'm a big fan of is to do it from the first minute right. Which means every time I build something quickly to just identify if it works or not, I end up in the exact devil's loop that you were just explaining. By having like a fucked up interface that will fall back on my feet at some point, while me taking a couple of more minutes, maybe a couple of hours to make a plan, to think a little bit more into the future and also see dependencies and possible ways of expanding certain feature sets, I'm designing and working in a complete different mode and on a complete different level. I think that's the typical thing that companies who are very engineering focused are tempted to which is doing it quick and dirty. Quick and dirty is good to start a business because markets are not sleeping. On the other hand, if you are doing things quick and dirty, what is stopping you from doing it good and quick and a little bit dirty or a little bit less dirty actually. We have these days so many design systems and so many ways to better design products. If we just talk about back office applications, it doesn't take you a minute more to look around and just choose something that is not like from 1955. What's the key message for the audience here? I think the whole internet will explode at one point because we have so much legacy. Some of the big companies have one big important buck and everything goes down. With that said, I'm ending it in a very cynical way. Let's end it once in a while or in a very bad manner, boom, it's over. But I mean still everyone listening here should have the ambition to try and do it better. Save the word, save the technology. Questions, comments, share. Peace This was the Product Bakery. All links can be found in the podcast description and make sure to follow and subscribe for weekly episodes on all podcast platforms as well as YouTube.