In surfing, the best place to be is in the “power pocket” or curl of the wave. You have to wait a bit longer to be there, but that extra wait means you get to surf at the maximum speed possible for that wave. Get anything wrong (too soon or too late) and you get knocked off and have to catch the next one.  

It is critical to keep updating your tech stack so you don’t get left behind. However, it can be easy to be fooled by the latest tech. As the promises get bigger, you get closer to being on the “Bleeding edge“. If you choose the latest new technology quickly it opens you up to:

• Usability problems for your customers
• Delays or even blockers because no one else has spotted the bug your dev team has found
• Constantly revising your solution (and potentially architecture) as problems are discovered
• Not being able to recruit people with the new skill set
• Zero-day exploits

Staying with obsolete or older technologies leads to:

• Higher security risks
• Compromises to “patch together” the older and newer stacks
• Long time between updates
• Compatibility drops off
• Staff get bored or disillusioned and leave

Coordinate senior stakeholders and tech teams to focus on the right timing to enable innovation, but not burn effort needlessly.

You need to find ways to pitch the timing of new technology that allows others to find the usability issues, scaling problems, or bugs rather than you. Think of the number of major updates that are then followed within hours or days with a minor update to fix the critical issues that are only noticed in the real world. 

A simple mitigation is leaving a good gap between the latest release and your adoption of it. This becomes much harder when you look at significantly newer technologies. For instance, it is going to be difficult to persuade your dev team (or upper management) to only go for one new technology in their stack rather than a whole family of interconnected products. Ideally try for an agreed adoption principle, such as wait a year before adopting some “shiny” new tech – resulting in reducing delays and wasted effort from being the first to adopt.