Definition
Business-Backward Development
A software architecture philosophy that starts from business requirements, user trust, compliance constraints, and production quality standards — then designs the system to meet them. Contrasts with technology-forward development, which starts from available tools and finds appropriate use cases. At Woz, this means making CTO-level architectural decisions before any code is generated, encoding security guardrails as system defaults, and removing options that would allow founders to unknowingly introduce vulnerabilities. The analogy: putting the safe scissors out and locking up the adult scissors before the toddler enters the room.
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