The founder stared at the codebase. "Every change breaks something," he said. "We used to ship new features in days. Now it takes weeks."
His product had grown. The team had grown. But the maintainability hadn't.
This is the invisible tax of success. Your product becomes more valuable, and simultaneously harder to change.
The Reality of Product Maintenance
When you first launch a product, everything feels simple. You know every line of code. You remember why you made every decision. Bugs are easy to find and quick to fix.
But products don't stay simple. They grow. Features accumulate. Users request changes. The market shifts. What was once a lean, focused application becomes a complex system with years of accumulated decisions, shortcuts, and technical debt.
The transition from "easy to maintain" to "hard to maintain" rarely happens overnight. It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly, until one day you realize that something you used to do in hours now takes days.
The Maintainability Decline Curve
Most startups experience a similar pattern:
Phase 1: The Honeymoon Period (Months 1-6)
- Codebase is small and familiar
- Changes are fast and straightforward
- Technical debt is minimal or nonexistent
- Everyone understands the system
Phase 2: The Slow Creep (Months 6-18)
- New features are added faster than code is cleaned up
- Multiple people have touched the codebase
- "Quick fixes" have accumulated
- Documentation hasn't kept pace with changes
Phase 3: The Breaking Point (Months 18+)
- Every change requires understanding context you don't have
- Bugs appear in unexpected places
- Development velocity has slowed significantly
- Fear of change is palpable in the team
Recognizing which phase you're in is the first step to addressing the problem.
Why Products Become Hard to Maintain
Understanding the root causes helps you address them effectively.
Accumulated Shortcuts
Every "we'll fix it later" became "we never fixed it." Those decisions compound over time.
In the early stages, shortcuts feel necessary. You're racing against time, trying to validate your idea before runway runs out. You make calls like:
- "We'll use a simple solution here and optimize later"
- "This isn't perfect but it works—let's ship it"
- "We'll come back and refactor this once we have users"
The problem is that "later" never comes. Each shortcut adds a small amount of debt. Over months and years, that debt accumulates into a significant burden.
According to research by Microsoft, the cost of fixing a bug increases exponentially over time. A bug that costs $100 to fix in the development phase can cost $10,000 to fix after release. This is the real cost of accumulated shortcuts.
Increased Complexity
More features mean more interactions. More interactions mean more edge cases. More edge cases mean more bugs.
Consider a simple e-commerce application. Initially, it might just have:
- Product catalog
- Shopping cart
- Checkout process
But then you add:
- User accounts and profiles
- Order history and tracking
- Wishlists and favorites
- Product reviews and ratings
- Related product recommendations
- Inventory management
- Multiple payment options
- Shipping integrations
- Tax calculations
- Discounts and promotions
- Analytics and reporting
Each feature interacts with others in unexpected ways. A change to how products are displayed might affect how they're tracked in inventory. A change to checkout might impact how discounts are applied. The complexity grows exponentially, not linearly.
Knowledge Fragmentation
No one person understands the whole system anymore. Changes in one area affect unknown areas.
This is especially true as teams grow. When you have three developers, you can keep everyone aligned through conversation. When you have ten developers across different time zones, knowledge becomes siloed.
Developer A works on the frontend. Developer B works on the backend. Developer C works on infrastructure. Each becomes an expert in their area but less familiar with others.
When something breaks, who do you call? When you need to add a feature that touches multiple areas, who coordinates? The answer often becomes "no one" or "everyone," neither of which is efficient.
Outdated Patterns and Technologies
What worked two years ago might not work now. But fixing it means finding time to fix it.
Technology evolves rapidly. Frameworks release new versions. Security vulnerabilities are discovered. Best practices change.
The application you built in 2022 might be using patterns that are now considered anti-patterns. The dependencies you relied on might no longer be maintained. The security practices you implemented might have vulnerabilities that have since been discovered.
Updating these things takes time and attention—resources that are always in short supply at a growing startup.
Warning Signs Your Product Is Becoming Hard to Maintain
Before your product becomes unmaintainable, it sends warning signals. Learn to recognize them:
Development Velocity Has Slowed
If features that used to take a week now take a month, you're experiencing the most obvious symptom of maintainability problems. The "friction coefficient" of your development process has increased.
Track your development velocity over time. If you see a consistent downward trend, investigate why.
Bug Reports Are Increasing
A growing number of bugs, especially regressions (bugs that appear after you thought you fixed something), indicates that changes are becoming too risky. The system is too complex to change safely.
Onboarding Takes Too Long
If it takes new developers weeks to become productive instead of days, your codebase has become difficult to understand. Complex systems require extensive context to work with effectively.
Fear of Change
If developers (including you) hesitate to make changes because "something might break," you've crossed into dangerous territory. A codebase that can't be changed is a codebase that can't evolve—and a product that can't evolve is a product that will die.
Documentation Is Outdated or Nonexistent
When no one can remember how something works or why a decision was made, you've lost crucial context. Good documentation preserves knowledge; poor documentation loses it.
Technical Debt Is Visible
If you can point to specific areas of the codebase and say "this is a mess," you have acknowledged technical debt. The question is whether you're managing it or ignoring it.
The Intervention Strategy
You have three strategic options for addressing maintainability problems. Each has trade-offs.
Option 1: Incremental Improvement
Approach: Dedicate 20% of each sprint to debt reduction. Slowly improve things over time.
This is the most sustainable approach for most teams. You don't need special permission to spend 20% of your time on improvement. You can start immediately.
How it works:
- Every sprint, identify one or two small technical debt items
- Address them systematically
- Track progress over time
- Celebrate small wins
What to tackle first:
- Remove duplicate code
- Rename unclear variables and functions
- Add missing tests for critical paths
- Update outdated documentation
- Clean up configuration files
- Remove unused dependencies
The key insight: Small, consistent improvements compound. Spending 20% of your time on maintenance every sprint means you're constantly improving, never falling too far behind.
What doesn't work: Waiting until everything is broken, then taking a big refactor pass. You never get permission for that. You do get permission for 20%.
Option 2: Strategic Refactoring
Approach: Pick one area that's causing the most pain. Fix it completely. Repeat.
Sometimes incremental improvement isn't enough. Some parts of your system are so problematic that they need dedicated attention.
How it works:
- Identify the area causing the most pain (often measured by bug frequency, development time, or developer frustration)
- Dedicate a sprint or two to rewriting that specific component
- Focus on reducing complexity, not adding features
- Verify that the new implementation is better through metrics
When this makes sense:
- A specific module is a known bottleneck
- You're about to build new features on top of fragile foundations
- The cost of maintaining the status quo exceeds the cost of rewriting
- You have team capacity to focus on this
What to watch out for:
- Don't rewrite everything at once
- Don't try to improve the code while adding features
- Set clear success criteria before starting
- Have a rollback plan
Option 3: Selective Rewrite
Approach: Some parts need to be replaced entirely. Be careful—rewrites are risky.
The most dramatic option is to completely replace a problematic component. This is sometimes necessary, but carries significant risk.
The famous rewrite failure: Joel Spolsky famously wrote that "the single worst mistake you can make is to throw away existing code." Rewrites often take longer than expected, introduce new bugs, and delay feature development.
When a rewrite might be justified:
- The original code is so poorly written that understanding it takes longer than rewriting
- The technology stack is obsolete and unsupported
- You're fundamentally changing the architecture (monolith to microservices, for example)
- The business requirements have changed so much that little of the original code applies
How to rewrite safely:
- Parallel run: Keep the old system running alongside the new one
- Incremental migration: Replace one piece at a time
- Feature flags: Enable the new code for some users gradually
- Rollback plan: Know how to go back if things go wrong
Practical Techniques for Immediate Improvement
Beyond the strategic options, there are specific techniques that can help:
Automate Testing
If you don't have automated tests, start building them. Focus on:
- Unit tests for business logic
- Integration tests for critical user flows
- Smoke tests to catch major regressions quickly
The goal isn't 100% coverage (which is neither achievable nor valuable). The goal is enough coverage to catch major bugs before they reach production.
Implement Code Review
Every code change should be reviewed by at least one other developer. This:
- Catches bugs before they're merged
- Shares knowledge across the team
- Enforces coding standards
- Creates accountability for code quality
Establish Coding Standards
Unwritten rules lead to inconsistent code. Document your standards for:
- Naming conventions
- Code organization
- Comment expectations
- Error handling patterns
- Testing requirements
Reduce Coupling
Loosely coupled systems are easier to maintain. Look for:
- Components that know too much about others
- Functions that do too many things
- Shared state between unrelated modules
Refactor to create clearer boundaries.
Invest in Monitoring
You can't fix what you can't see. Implement:
- Error tracking (Sentry, Rollbar)
- Performance monitoring (New Relic, Datadog)
- User behavior analytics
- Alerting for critical issues
When you can see problems quickly, you can fix them before they compound.
Building a Culture of Maintainability
Technical solutions aren't enough. You need to build a culture that values maintainability.
Make Technical Debt Visible
Technical debt is like credit card debt—it feels fine until the bill comes due. Make debt visible by:
- Tracking debt items in your backlog
- Estimating the cost of each item
- Discussing debt during planning
- Allocating time for debt repayment
When debt is invisible, it accumulates unchecked. When it's visible, you can manage it.
Celebrate Maintenance Wins
Maintenance work often goes unnoticed. Celebrate when you:
- Remove legacy code
- Improve build times
- Fix a long-standing bug
- Complete a refactoring effort
This signals that maintenance is valued, not just tolerated.
Balance Speed and Quality
There's a tension between shipping fast and building well. The key is finding balance:
- Ship fast enough to stay competitive
- Build well enough to keep moving fast
Neither extreme serves you. Going too fast leads to unmaintainable code. Going too slow leads to missed opportunities.
Learn from Mistakes
When bugs happen, don't just fix them. Understand why they happened:
- Was it a process issue?
- Was it a testing gap?
- Was it unclear requirements?
Fix the root cause, not just the symptom.
The Cost of Inaction
Ignoring maintainability has real costs:
Developer Productivity: Every hour spent fighting with fragile code is an hour not spent building features. Over a year, this can represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity.
Bug Fixing Time: Unmaintainable code breeds bugs. Each bug takes time to diagnose, fix, and verify. The cycle repeats endlessly.
Onboarding Costs: When new developers can't get up to speed quickly, you're paying for their learning curve instead of their contributions.
Opportunity Cost: When you're buried in maintenance, you can't pursue new opportunities. Your competitors, who aren't weighed down, move faster.
Team Morale: Working with difficult code is demoralizing. Good developers will leave for environments where they can do their best work.
The Bottom Line
Products don't become maintainable by accident. They become maintainable by intention.
If you're not actively maintaining, you're actively degrading.
The goal isn't perfection. The goal is sustainable progress—building a codebase that you can continue to evolve as your product grows.
Start today:
-
Acknowledge the problem. If your product is getting harder to maintain, you're not alone.
-
Choose your approach. Incremental improvement works for most teams. Strategic refactoring helps when you have specific pain points. Rewrites are a last resort.
-
Start small. Pick one improvement and complete it. Build momentum.
-
Make it sustainable. Dedicate regular time to maintenance. Don't let debt accumulate.
-
Measure progress. Track your development velocity, bug rate, and other metrics. Improvements should be visible.
The best time to improve maintainability was when you started. The second best time is now.
Need Help Making Your Product Maintainable?
At Startupbricks, we help startups find the right intervention strategy. Whether you need:
- A technical audit to identify the biggest problems
- A refactoring roadmap for your most painful areas
- Guidance on building a sustainable maintenance practice
- Help with a strategic rewrite
We have experience helping products at every stage of the maintainability journey.