Aim high, but aim with purpose

There's nothing wrong with ambitious technology.

The problem is technology that aims high without knowing what it's aiming at.

I've seen it on a dozen engagements: a talented team, a genuinely sophisticated architecture, and no clear connection between what they're building and what the business needs to achieve. Event-driven, cloud-native, highly scalable, all the nice sounding, impressive adjectives.

And produces no revenue at all, costs a fortune to build. Or solves a problem that the market doesn't have, never validated, or outright rejected. Then act surprised when the project is shut down and abandoned.

Technology was never the goal, it's a means to an end only.

When the business need and the technical direction aren't connected explicitly, in writing, in a shared place the whole team can see, this is when you get drift. The product builds towards elegance instead of outcomes, features instead of solutions. Infrastructure spend climbs while features that don't matter get polished. The things that do matter get deprioritised because they're less interesting. So human, focus is hard, keeping direction wins but masquarades unsexy in press releases.

A Tech North Star actually forces the connection between business and tech. It starts from business context — what does this system exist to do, for whom, under what constraints and works inward to the technical decisions. It connects for non-techies too.

Ambitious technology can be valuable on its own, but usually not economically.

Without that connection, you're spending real money going in the wrong direction to get to nowhere fast. As a leader, you are responsible for the direction. Get the help of my Tech North Stars.

(P.S. when the business becomes the technology itself, you get the bubbles like dotcom and genAI. Valuations divorced from reality.)