#21 Early decisions shape everything that follows

Some choices organize everything that comes after, in life as well as in technology.

I am back in Austria, the country where my adulthood began. I came here straight after high school and fell in love with everything that came with it. The landscape. The food. The culture. The pace. I learned German well enough to later take a job in Switzerland, where I met Martin. I have Austria to thank for much more than I realised at the time. In many ways, I have Austria to thank for my entire adult life.

It was one of those early decisions that cannot be undone. I could have chosen something else. Another country. Another direction. But once the choice was made, the rest of my life quietly organised itself around it.

So I am back in Austria, and my baby boy has just learned to say “Tschüss!” He says it constantly. I guess that some of the decisions I make now will shape his life too, just as earlier decisions shaped mine.

I think about technology in the same way.

The early decisions we make in technological systems tend to follow us for a very long time. The first way you set up an ad account, the structure of your analytics, the naming conventions, the access rights, the way data flows between systems. These things rarely get revisited. They become infrastructure. And infrastructure is hard to argue with later.

Once an ad account is created, its logic often lives on for years. Once a CRM is structured in a certain way, reporting, workflows, and decision-making adapt to that structure. Once you choose a platform, your future options are shaped by what that platform makes easy and what it makes difficult. Strategy becomes path-dependent.

This is not about making perfect choices from the start. That is impossible. It is about understanding that early technological decisions are rarely neutral. They carry long-term consequences that outlast the moment they were made in.