Don't Stand in the Middle of the Street

When faced with tradeoffs, it’s tempting to devise halfway plans that look like a Goldilocks approach but are really just “middle” paths. This is frequently a hedge - not an actual decision, but an unwillingness to prioritize and commit.

Balanced tradeoffs are about finding space between various pressures and needs, which are often not of the same class (e.g., schedule vs. quality).

A “middle of the street” option tries to satisfy as many needs as possible, but usually does so with mediocrity.

When you stand in the middle of the street, you run a big risk of getting run over.

Example (albeit technical)

For a new product, we had to evaluate data storage options. The team had extensive Elasticsearch experience, but we were considering Postgres. Postgres would require a lot of new infrastructure but would allow easier integrations like analytics tools.

Elasticsearch was expedient for development (we liked the document model and had a lot of tooling). Postgres would incur upfront costs, but it might be better for the product.

So we considered a third option: MongoDB. Documents, semi-structured data, and already many integration options.

But MongoDB would still require new tooling and wasn’t as good as Postgres for the integrations being considered. As soon as we recognized it as a “middle of the street” option, we ruled it out.