Tech
Designing Interfaces Without Modeling Coordination Cost
Companies see a feature request and estimate only the implementation cost, skipping maintenance, coordination, and opportunity costs. They make a technical decision without the economic half of the equation.
Dependencies across teams increase merge times compared to single-team work. That friction shows up as velocity is down this quarter, not as our interface decision from two years ago is costing us three times the engineering hours per feature. The report estimates that coordination from pull request timing, review rounds, and spread across repositories and authors.