Kent Beck explains the three phases of product development and how engineering practices should adapt to each phase
Kent Beck's 3X framework provides a crucial insight: the right engineering practices depend on your product's phase. This talk challenges the one-size-fits-all approach to software development that causes so much friction in organizations.
The three phases are: Explore (searching for product-market fit), Expand (scaling rapidly to capture market), and Extract (optimizing for efficiency and margin). Each phase requires fundamentally different approaches to risk, quality, and technical debt.
In Explore, you should optimize for learning speed - technical debt is acceptable, comprehensive testing slows you down, and pivoting quickly is more important than code quality. In Expand, you need just enough quality to scale - selective refactoring, testing critical paths, and accepting some instability for growth.
In Extract, you optimize for efficiency - comprehensive testing, careful refactoring, and stability over features. The framework explains why "best practices" from one company often fail at another - they're in different phases.
For technical leaders, this framework helps justify different engineering standards for different projects and prevents the common mistake of applying Extract-phase practices to Explore-phase products (or vice versa).
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