The Consequences: High Costs and Lost Opportunities
The biggest problem in the Extract phase is not just the inflated costs, but the loss of optionality. The rigidity of the codebase prevents the team from adapting to new opportunities, acting as a barrier to innovation. It’s a classic case of short-term gains leading to long-term pains.
Here is where Facebook’s genius at the time shone. Rather than treat every project as a high-risk, bet-the-farm endeavor, Facebook spun out a stream of further low-risk Explorations, each treated with the Explore rules. When one of them blew up, Expand rules took over, resulting in an edifice of big successes built from bricks of small failures.