Build it once, leave it for five years, and watch the gap open

Remember when you bought a new car and expected it to last a decade, with nothing more than the odd service and a Snoop Dogg CD permanently stuck in the player? That’s roughly how a lot of organisations still treat their digital products. Build it, launch it, pop the champagne, and quietly leave it alone for five or six years until it’s embarrassing enough to justify the next big project. 

I’ve been designing digital products for long enough to have seen this cycle play out many times, and I’ll let you in on something. The gap between established organisations and nimble challengers doesn’t open before launch. Most big organisations can build a very good thing. The gap opens in the years after. 

The challenger’s secret is boring 

Challengers aren’t smarter, and they usually don’t have more money. They just treat their website or app as a product, not a project. They change something every week. A button moves, a form loses two fields, a confusing sentence gets rewritten. Nothing dramatic, but after fifty-two weeks, then a hundred and four, they’re running a product shaped by thousands of small lessons about real customers, while you’re running a very handsome snapshot of what you believed in 2021. 

It’s the Blockbuster problem in slow motion. Nobody at Blockbuster was dumb. They had a great model for a world that kept moving on without them. I do miss those days rummaging through DVDs though!  

The hidden culprit is the budget 

When I ask leadership teams why they leave things for years, nobody says “because we don’t care.” It’s usually something more mundane: the money is set up that way. 

Digital gets funded as CapEx. A big, one-off capital project has a start date, an end date, a business case and a sign-off. Then it’s done, it goes on the books as an asset, and the money stops. Anything after that has to be fought for again, usually as a “nice to have” against every other priority in the building. 

That works nicely for a warehouse. It works badly for something that is never finished, because your customers’ expectations and your competitors’ products keep moving. The budget model quietly says “this is complete”, while the reality says “this started decaying the moment it went live.” 

It also forces everyone to place one enormous bet at the moment you know the least. You’re guessing what customers want before a single one has used the thing. Anyone who’s read Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality will recognise the opposite instinct: the magic comes from paying close attention to real people, over and over, and adjusting. You can’t do that on a five-year cycle. It’s like a restaurant that designs its menu once, in 2019, and refuses to look at what anyone actually ordered. 

The case to take to finance 

I’m a designer, definitely not an accountant, and your finance team will rightly know the accounting treatment better than I do. But here’s the argument I’d put in front of them, in the language they care about. 

1. It cuts risk, it doesn’t add cost. A big-bang rebuild is the riskiest way to spend money: large, late, and judged only at the end. Small, frequent changes are tested against real behaviour, so the bad ideas die cheaply and the good ones compound. 

2. You’re already paying for it, just invisibly. Every year you don’t iterate, you pay in lost conversions, support calls caused by confusing journeys, workarounds in your own team, and eventually a rebuild that costs more because the gap is now so wide. That cost just never has its own line in the budget. 

3. A standing budget gives you a lever, not a blank cheque. Ask for a fixed, ring-fenced amount each year, say a proportion of the original build cost, with a visible backlog of improvements ranked by expected impact. Finance can see what’s being spent, what’s been shipped, and what moved as a result. If something isn’t working, you stop. That’s more control than a once-every-five-years mega-project provides. 

4. It turns an asset that depreciates into one that earns. A product left alone loses value from launch day. One that’s continually improved is a growing asset. Same money, very different trajectory. 

What “good” looks like 

Think of it like the Nokia 3310 versus the smartphone. One was brilliant, indestructible, finished and can we pour one out for Snake? The other gets better while it’s in your pocket. Your customers are carrying the second kind of device, so they expect the second kind of experience from you. 

A standing budget doesn’t need to be huge. It needs to be there: a small, steady team (ours or yours), a clear backlog, a regular rhythm of shipping and measuring, and an agreed way to report results back to the people holding the purse strings. 

Start by asking one question in your next budget meeting: “What happens to this product on the day after launch, and who’s paying for it?” If the answer is a long silence, you’ve found your gap. 

If you’d like to pressure-test the numbers, or you’d just like a sounding board before you walk into that finance meeting, I’m always happy to chat. No slides required. 

Ryan Campbell is a Design Director at Journey, based in our New Zealand office, and is accredited by the Designers Institute of New Zealand (DINZ).