Long-Term Sense

Most leaders suck at seeing the long-term impact of things. They hear about problems—support tickets crushing the team, test suites taking 20 minutes, security teams drowning—but they don't see what's driving them or where they're headed. Jade Rubick gives you a four-step technique for spotting time bombs before they detonate.

First, identify the input. What's actually varying that's making the problem worse? Is it customer growth? New features? Team size? Find the thing that's changing and driving the output. Second, look at the long-term implications. Will this continue? Are there counter forces? Most of the time the answer is "yes, this will keep getting worse" and that's when you should be thinking "oh shit." Third, figure out how much time is left on the time bomb. These problems are rarely urgent but they compound. A culture of deferring time bombs means they all hit at once. Fourth, look for two types of solutions: one that fixes it forever, and one that makes things incrementally better.

The examples are concrete. Slow test suites that add friction every day. Security teams that can't keep up with engineering growth and will eventually stop being able to do their job at all. The key insight is that you're trying to assess whether things are getting better or worse over time. If something makes engineering slower over time, that's catastrophic. You want all your long-term trends heading in a positive direction so your flywheel of value delivery gets faster, not slower.

One trick: add a comparison. If AWS costs are rising, the question isn't just "are they rising" but "are they rising faster than customer revenue?" That's the difference between sustainable and unsustainable. Practice this and you'll develop a sixth sense for problems nobody else is thinking about yet. The downside? Fixing issues nobody knows exist is thankless work. So when you talk about these problems, come up with a succinct phrase that makes the stakes clear: "Support tickets are rising at an unsustainable rate. At the current trend, engineering will be completely focused on support within 18 months." That gets attention.