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Wireframes Are Cheap, Engineering Should Be Too

I have spent the majority of my career in engineering roles at startups. Both at companies I have worked at, and in the general startup ecosystem, I have frequently heard some variation of the refrain “engineers are expensive, but wireframes are cheap”. While I align with the underlying sentiment that doing the least amount of work to get customer signal is optimal, the phrase has always bothered me. As an engineering leader, I do not want the rest of the organization to view the work that my colleagues and I do as some luxury that should only be leveraged after we have reached complete confidence that a product or feature needs to be built.

As an engineering leader, I do not want the rest of the organization to view the work that my colleagues and I do as some luxury that should only be leveraged after we have reached complete confidence that a product or feature needs to be built. While it has become a severely overloaded term at this point, I view infrastructure as the parts of a system that reduce the cost and blast radius of introducing new or removing existing functionality. Organizations that have it are frequently able to operate more efficiently than those who habitually defer engineering work because they get higher fidelity signal on the usefulness of a product or feature, and the path from experiment to general availability is much clearer.

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