As A Founder What Does Best Practices Actually Mean?

Your dev team’s “best practices” might be optimizing for their comfort, not your product.

I don’t mean this as an accusation. Most developers genuinely believe the patterns they recommend are the right call. But “best practice” has become a conversation-stopper in software – the moment someone invokes it, the expectation is that you stop asking questions. And that’s exactly when founders should start.

Here’s what I see on real teams. A developer recommends a pattern, framework, or architecture because it’s what they know, what they’ve used before, or what looks good on their resume. They frame it as industry standard. And the founder, not wanting to seem ignorant, nods along. Six months later, the product is over-engineered for its stage, the team is slow, and nobody can explain why a two-person startup needs the same infrastructure patterns as Netflix.

The signal to watch for: when a recommendation comes with “everyone does it this way” but no explanation of what it costs you or what alternative was considered. Real best practices come with tradeoffs. If your team can’t articulate the tradeoff – what you’re giving up in exchange for what you’re gaining – they might be following convention rather than solving your problem.

The question that protects you: “What’s the simplest version of this that ships value to customers, and why isn’t that enough?” A team that can answer honestly is a team you can trust. A team that gets defensive is telling you something.

You don’t need to know whether microservices or a monolith is the right architecture. You need to know whether your team chose it for your product’s needs or for their own preferences. That distinction protects your runway.

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