“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I feel like all startup founders have, at some point, heard this phrase from someone in their circle.
On the surface, it’s a simple, straightforward warning not to invest in fixing things that “function” — especially when there are new, urgent, and important projects looming on the horizon. After all, momentum is everything when it comes to building a successful startup, right? Slow down, and you risk becoming obsolete in a fast-paced market as you fight for your slice of the pie. You lose out to competitors as you fight for your slice of the pie.
However, what I feel is often not included in these cautionary words is what “broken” actually means.
Let’s take a step back and define it.
The great build fast vs. optimization debate
When I became a founder, I was instantly surrounded by a crowd of voices telling me to “build faster,” find “product-market fit ASAP,” and “just get something out there.” All of this makes total sense on the surface: startups are supposed to build, not optimize. “Just getting something out there” is a core piece of the Lean Startup methodology, after all.
So, I was confused when I found myself post-beta in a recurring debate with my product manager, Kat, about whether we needed to improve existing features. Kat said yes; I disagreed. Our features “worked,” our current customers weren’t churning because of them. Based on what I had been told, it felt wrong to dedicate time to redesigning features that “functioned.” That’s not what a startup is supposed to do,” I thought, “that’s optimization and that’s bad.”
“You could have more customers if your platform wasn’t such a pain to use,” Kat would say and reference common UX statistics. “Functionality isn’t everything.”
I had mixed feelings about this for a while. On one hand, of course I wanted to make our platform as nice as possible for our users. On the other hand, I wanted to take the advice I’d been given: to move quickly and deal with optimizing later.
If you don’t know if something is broken, consult the data
A couple of weeks ago, I had a productive discussion about this problem with a fellow startup founder. He gave me a simple, yet powerful question to ask myself: “Is this issue bottlenecking how many customers you got this month?”
This sounds so obvious, but it’s really not, especially when you are in the trenches. After asking myself that, I still wasn’t sure—so I turned to our lord and savior, data.
Data told me that, yes – it was bottlenecking our growth, quietly holding us back. Despite our rapid pace of new development based on customer feedback, growth had been slow for nearly three months.
Looking at the numbers, I realized that unpredictable small glitches and hidden access points were preventing our users from reaching the aha moment — the crucial point of a user’s journey when the core value of a product is realized.
Our pages may not have been functionally broken — they “worked” just fine — but they were broken from a usability perspective. This was causing high drop-off rates during the onboarding process.
Once this became clear to me, I made a decision. We stopped all feature development and went into one month of refactoring and improving our design. The outcome? Our onboarding conversion rate went from 5% to 25%.
So, if it ain’t broke, should you fix it?
The old saying isn’t necessarily wrong — you shouldn’t waste your team’s time on features that work — but it all depends on your definition of broken. I had been defining broken as “not functional,” but the data showed me that it has a much broader meaning.
“Broken” means anything that costs you customers, and that can cover a lot of territory. Poor user experience can impact customer conversions just as much as a feature that doesn’t functionally work. This is especially true now when customer expectations are higher than ever.
As startups, we’re encouraged to move fast, to sprint, and to get our product to market as quickly as possible. This is the accepted wisdom, but it can set us up to ignore things that are broken in favor of moving fast. When we neglect the baseline usability of our products and just focus on new functionality, we might feel like we are sprinting. But the fact is, we might just be running in place on a treadmill.
There’s nothing wrong with accepted wisdom; we use it for a reason. But when founders follow that wisdom unquestioningly, we might be shooting ourselves in the foot without even realizing it.
As startups, we need to build products that provide the highest value to our users in order to move forward. Sometimes, that means making the value that exists easily accessible. And sometimes that means standing back and looking at advice like “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Maybe the phrase itself is broken. Maybe, by adjusting our approach to this idea, we can fix it while providing better solutions for our users.
Thomas Noh is the founder of Sociable AI, a platform that trains AI on brand voice to automate personalized social media interactions.
Sign stock image by Chuck Wagner/Shutterstock
