Look for Average Advice
We talk to users and subject matter experts to understand what to build. But when we’re unsure how to build it, we look to experts - people who’ve solved hard problems before. The trouble is, their solutions often lead us straight into failure. Our problems aren’t hard yet, just new.
What we really need isn’t expert advice, it’s average advice.
Expert advice talks about elegance, scalability, and optimization. Average advice talks about what broke, what got duct-taped together, and what survived just long enough to matter. It’s grounded in reality, not mastery. It comes from people still figuring things out, who don’t have infinite resources or decades of domain experience.
Average advice moves you forward. That’s the only thing that matters early on.
Why Expert Advice fails Early Teams
Expert advice comes from a different context. It’s written from the mountaintop - after the hard part is over. When experts describe their systems, they’re talking about scaling what already works. Their advice assumes a level of maturity and scale most small teams just don’t have yet.
We read that advice and start to think the mess means we’re off track. In reality, that mess is a sign of progress.
Managing the Mess
Here’s the hard part: leadership doesn’t always see it that way. From the outside, early products seem full of red flags - technical debt, instability, “non-scalable” decisions.
When under pressure, it’s tempting to defend yourself by pointing to expert standards. But that often backfires, because your reality isn’t theirs.
A better move is to reframe the mess. Explain that the current chaos is intentional learning - each quick fix or tradeoff is buying information, not just cutting corners. Clarify the tradeoff between flexibility and specialization, and explain why flexibility is more important for your business.
Your job isn’t to convince leadership that everything’s fine - it’s to help them understand why it looks wrong but isn’t.
Tradeoff Traps
When we follow expert playbooks too early, we adopt tradeoffs meant for another scale entirely:
- Complexity: Experts add layers of sophistication because they can hire specialists. Small teams need simplicity, as they can’t spend weeks debugging cleverness.
- Buy vs. Build: Experts lean on vendor software; their budgets make it painless. Small teams need flexibility, so sometimes “good enough” homegrown tools win.
- Specialization: Experts optimize for efficiency. Early teams should optimize for change.
Recap
Early products should be messy. That’s how you learn what matters.
Average advice reminds us that the path to expertise is paved with temporary hacks, false starts, and rough edges. The challenge isn’t just to survive that phase - it’s to help everyone around you see that it’s supposed to look like this.
If you can make leadership comfortable with that reality, you buy your team the space to experiment, and that’s where real progress starts. Worrying about scalability is a champagne problem.