Guiding principles for build vs. buy decisions

What can we learn from the big tech companies?

The ‘build vs buy’ decision is a rich topic. At its heart, it’s about how to use developer attention: do I spend my team’s time and attention to build a thing, or do I spend money for a vendor’s time and attention? At many companies, developer attention is the scarcest resource and bottleneck to delivering product features. Any time you make more productive use of developer attention, you’ve effectively multiplied the velocity of your development team.

In this article, I’ll present two guiding principles for the ‘build vs buy’ calculus, and explore case studies of outstanding companies and cautionary tales.

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