What Mistake Did Harmony AI Make?

Brian McKeown says one mistake at Harmony AI was prioritizing speed over quality. At an earlier deployment, the team built the software fast, then realized the behavior was not the way to deliver what the customer actually wanted.

Noah Labhart asked Brian McKeown for a mistake and how he and the team responded. Brian McKeown ties the story to the speed-versus-quality trade-off. The work was for an early customer, so he says it is hard to call the choice a pure mistake. Downstream, the software already behaved one way. As Harmony AI filled in missing pieces and gathered more context on the solution the customer wanted, the original approach no longer fit the larger picture.

The response is a judgment call. Harmony AI has to gauge whether some solutions can be band-aided or whether the whole thing should be rewritten so it matches what the customer has now provided.