You Don’t Win by Cheating | ✉️ #96

The Spanish national football team represents an idea that goes far beyond sport: you can compete, dominate, and win without giving up your identity.

Spain wants the ball. It wants to build from the back, take risks, and find spaces where none seem to exist. It does not always work, but even in defeat there is a recognizable method behind every decision.

Technology works the same way.

Building a great product is not about pretending it works, manipulating metrics, or looking for shortcuts to convince the market. That may help you win a match, but it will not help you build an era.

For too long, cleverness has been confused with gamesmanship. Argentina has often turned that narrative into part of its competitive identity: protesting, disrupting the rhythm, influencing the referee, and exploiting every grey area. It can produce results, but it is not the model we want to bring into a technology company.

A company does not play one final every four years. It plays every day.

Every feature is a pass. Every technical decision opens or closes a line of play. Every mistake forces the team to reorganize. And every customer needs to trust that the system will respond when the match becomes difficult.

A company can inflate its numbers, hide problems, or promise capabilities that do not yet exist. It may win a sale or attract investment, but sooner or later reality wins the ball back.

Spain offers something different: talent supported by structure, creativity within a system, and players who can make decisions because they understand the collective purpose.

That is also how a technology team should work. Engineering, product, sales, and leadership must play the same match. Innovation is not an individual move. It is a system that allows many people to do extraordinary things together.

We should not confuse integrity with naivety. We must compete with intensity, character, and ambition. But there is a difference between playing to the limit and cheating.

The limit makes the team stronger. Cheating makes it weaker, even when it seems to work for a few minutes.

We want to win like Spain: by circulating knowledge, creating advantages, trusting talent, and building an identity that remains even when the players change.

Because a victory achieved through a trick ends with the final whistle.

A well-built system can keep winning for years.

The 97th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, August 14th. See you next time!