alt Hacker News> Let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while.
This is one of my favorite blog posts, and it can basically be encapsulated in the idea of "innovation tokens." It is one of the most useful concepts I have had as a PM / eng leader in my career. It helps actually make the the right tradeoffs, and helps even more in explaining those tradeoffs to colleague of all levels. Highly recommend.
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There was another, much older, post similar to this about, I think, "beans" that engineers use to solve problems. If I remember correctly, it was something like, solving a problem costs "beans", and engineers will always use most all of their "beans" to solve a given problem, because it's somewhat "easy" until you run out of them.
Maybe it wasn't beans? But, I've been looking for it for years.
I also broadly agree with the post.
> If you choose to write your website in NodeJS, you just spent one of your innovation tokens.
Is NodeJS still considered on the same level of "unknown" / "not-boring" technology as the others listed? By my reckoning it is plenty mature enough to be considered a "boring" choice, and going for bun would be spending and innovation token.
I like the general concept, but I think framing it as a small number of discrete tokens isn't quite right. I'd treat the whole thing in terms of debt and risk. Using "non-boring" technology [0] is really just subtracting some amount from your balance. You don't want your balance to go too negative, but carrying some debt is sometimes fine. And some risky bets might turn out to have a huge ROI!
The amounts clearly aren't discrete. Writing your entire app on a new language runtime might be very risky (and also might have large potential ROI!), but choosing a new email provider might not be (random example, but presuming that you can swap out providers fairly easily).
[0] My bigger complaint is really about the vagueness of even deciding what is "boring." How does a new technology transition from being "non-boring" to being "boring"? Apparently that requires a lot of people to ignore this article's advice for a long time, until we collectively decide that those people have had good enough results to consider that technology "boring."
"Weirdness points" are similar: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/weirdness-points
I think the same way about any personal project. You can either make something unfamiliar, or make it with unfamiliar technology stack, but you shouldn't do both.
I think a core problem is that people read online and spend a weekend looking into something cool and get a pretty decent POC up and running. But that's a single person in a weekend, nowadays accellerated by LLMs - what they cannot see (or, something that comes with experience) is how expensive or invasive it would be to apply that in your team or company-wide.
But innovation tokens is a neat idea, it's not personal - no big bad grumpy old senior being a square about CoolTech2026 - and it's an incentive to have someone that wants to do something cool think about it. The other one in that regard are ADRs, which I think is a very low barrier to entry path into architecture that most developers can do. It too forces the person to consider CoolTech2026 in a wider context - what does it solve, what is used right now to solve it, what other solutions are out there, etc - plus making it a team decision if executed right.