I hate "Quick Wins"

The text treats “quick wins” as a seductive shortcut that, although it seems to bring quick value, usually pushes the problem forward. The author says this increases technical debt, misaligns priorities, weakens the user experience, and compromises the architecture.

Reading notes

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• The author rejects “quick wins” because he sees in them a culture that prefers to hide problems behind abstractions or interfaces instead of solving the cause.
• At first, he presents quick wins as high impact and low effort, but states that this reading is often distorted when it becomes an excuse for short-termism.
• He lists as frequent effects the accumulation of technical debt, misaligned goals, excessive focus on the short term, inconsistent user experience, and compromised architecture.
• For the author, fixing only the symptoms creates more work later, increases maintenance costs, and exhausts the team.
• He states that pursuing quick results shifts innovation, strategic planning, and long-term vision to the background.
• The text says that successive patches produce a fragmented system, difficult to scale, maintain, and use.
• In the user experience, the author points out that quick solutions generate incoherent interfaces and flows, which confuse users and weaken the product identity.
• In architecture, he compares quick wins to building a structure without following instructions, which makes the system unstable for future changes.
• The text cites Volkswagen Dieselgate and Facebook’s “Move Fast and Break Things” motto as examples of shortcuts that ended up generating costs, loss of trust, and public crisis.
• As a way of dealing with it, the author proposes a long-term vision, root cause analysis, strategic planning, incremental delivery, stakeholder education, and continuous care with code quality and technical debt.
• He advocates using the Impact/Effort Matrix, the 5 Whys technique, agile practices, CI/CD, and regular refactoring to support more durable decisions.
• In the closing, the text says that the real victory is not in the speed of delivery, but in the impact built with purpose and in the ability to sustain the system over time.