Religion has become a real problem within technical and creative teams.  It has found its way through the vents in your office, and has infiltrated the minds of your best team members.  It’s a virus that can deplete your funds and ruin your business, and it’s more prevalent than ever before.  But before a massive facebook group is organized against me, I should make it clear that I’m not talking about God.

Far too many technical questions are answered within the comfort zones of each developer.  In fact, they’re becoming religious about technology instead of outlining the pros and cons of their available options.  Developers are often too quick to stick with what they know under the guise of “release early, release often”, yet they fail to recognize the critical concept behind this motto; release a scalable product, not a comfortable one.  The results of this behavior can make your head spin, and has actually been a great source of business for my company (goodfellaz.com).

This is not to say that leaning on your strongest skills is a bad habit, but it should not be your default playbook for every situation. Playbooks are for companies like Zynga, where their model depends on replicating the same product over and over.  Chances are your company needs to be flexible enough to perform over mobile, web, and desktop.  You can’t do this if your team is religious about technology, because most forms of client-side software do not work across all browsers and/or hardware.

Adobe Flash is a great example because it can enrich your web application tenfold if used appropriately.  It has wide-spread adoption, and you can bet that most people will already have it installed before they visit your website.  Yet, Flash does not work on an IPhone (one of the most popular mobile devices on the planet), and it performs poorly on mobile devices that actually support it.  For this reason alone, countless websites have burned resource to release mobile-friendly versions of their sites which eliminate Flash from the equation.  Call me crazy, but that seems incredibly wasteful.  To make matters worse, nine times out of ten these websites are using Flash for a ridiculous purpose. You don’t need Flash to display a list of comments.  You don’t need Flash to slide a block of text off the screen.  I understand that Flash makes it easy and pretty, and that you can probably code these features quickly with your playbook of components, but you can also do all of these things with standard technology (Javascript) which, shockingly enough, works really well on all major mobile browser.  The only exceptions are those who wholeheartedly rely on flash, like UStream or YouTube. If you are using Flash for convenience, you may want to re-think your strategy.

I’m picking on Flash because it’s the most obvious example, but a developer’s religion can revolve around any language or software with which they are most comfortable.  As CEO of a creative engineering studio, I’ve seen projects burn in flames because of religion, and millions of dollars have been spent to correct the damage inflicted by it.  Project managers and executive teams should start asking the right questions before it’s too late.  Even if you follow Agile, it’s not a bad thing to ask questions about the long-term effect of this week’s decisions.  The more you think ahead, the easier it will be to keep religion out of the process.

Ps. I use Adobe CS4 frequently and am a big proponent of their products (when they’re necessary).  I hope we can still be friends, Flash.