There's a commonality in mindset that naturally occurs as a product finds success, one that can appear to align with best practices but for reasons that aren't always constructive. Building a product that has achieved market fit demands a new level of discipline: maintenance, scale, processes, and above all, careful change management.
The core requirement of this new phase is stability. While there may be compelling technical justifications to entirely replace parts or even all of the codebase, you're now at an operating level where the cost and risk of that change require significant investment and planning.
The Dangerous Alignment: Fear vs. Strategy
This is where a conservative mindset from a founder or early engineer can end up aligning with this philosophy of caution, but for the wrong reasons. Their resistance to change is often associated with false notions of perfect implementations or "un-improvable" codebases. It’s a perspective rooted in personal attachment to what was built.
This can look, on the surface, like a mature approach to risk management. In reality, it's a defensive posture that can stifle necessary evolution.
Suppose a well-informed senior engineer joins the team later. Unburdened by the history of the codebase, they can usually find more optimized, simplified, or modern solutions. As a leader, you must remain open to these new ideas, but you also have to balance them against the operational realities of your system.
The Myth of the "Big Bang" Rewrite
This tension often leads to the ultimate question: "Can we just rewrite the whole thing?"
The answer is almost always: yes, you can, but no, you probably shouldn't.
A full rewrite is a massive gamble. It takes a long time, during which the original product must still be maintained. Business needs will inevitably change before the rewrite is finished, and team morale can suffer during a long, arduous project with a distant payoff.
The Real Engineering Work
The true challenge and skill of engineering in a mature organization lie in navigating this middle ground. It's about finding ways to make progress and evolve the product while keeping the required systems of stability, compliance, and predictability in place.
This is the real engineering work. It’s not the greenfield excitement of the initial build, but the disciplined, strategic, and iterative improvement of a system that people rely on every day. It's about introducing change safely, measuring its impact, and continuously finding ways to make the product better without breaking the promises you've already made to your users.