Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Code quality matters less than you think

26 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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1:09

Lenny Rachitsky argues code quality matters less for product success than solving real user problems. YouTube beat Google Video despite having a messier codebase because it focused on what users actually wanted. Refactors and perfect architecture won't save a product that doesn't solve the right problem.

Chapters

A lot of engineers think that code quality is important to building a successful product. The two have nothing to do with each other. I was working at Google around the time YouTube was acquired. I just remember there was this whole wash of angst about how horrible the YouTube code base is and how terrible their architecture is. You could argue that YouTube is the most successful product at Google by a long way, right? Like, it really has very little to do with how well it was architected, because the flip side of that, Google video, It existed before YouTube. It supported more formats, it supported higher resolution. YouTube had none of this. And it's far and away blown away its competition. And so I think just keeping that front and center is why are we building these tools or these apps? They're for people to solve a specific problem, and that's really what's important. I continually encounter engineers who think we need to refactor, we need to do this in a better way. And then I'm like, no, all this code could be thrown away tomorrow. Just focus on what we're trying to build and whom we're trying to build for.