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ProcessEngineering · 5 min read
Why "best practices" are often the worst advice
"Best practice" is what worked for someone else, in their context, captured into a slogan. Following it without context is how teams ship the wrong thing on time.
"Industry best practice" is a phrase that should make you nervous. It’s pattern-matching dressed as authority. Whatever it once meant has long been abstracted from the context that made it useful.
Best practices have context attached
When you read about a practice that worked at Stripe, Spotify, or Netflix, the practice is doing 20% of the work. The other 80% is the context: their scale, their constraints, their team composition. Copying the practice without the context produces cargo cult engineering.
Ask before adopting
- What problem was this practice originally solving?
- What does it cost: politically, technically, culturally?
- Do we have that problem? At that scale?
- What would have to be true for this not to apply?
Best practices are someone else’s problem statement. Find yours first.