How much is enough technology? (2021-01)
This article was first published on LinkedIn in January 2021.
Someone asked me the other day: how much technology the businesses in Launchpad should have? Of course, I gave the correct answer, which is "just enough", which is very unhelpful of me. So, to compensate, how do you know when you have 'just enough technology'?
Sales-led and technology-led businesses
Most businesses I encounter seem to have taken either a 'sales led' or a 'technology led' culture. Neither is wrong in moderation, but are often used to 'excuse' an under- or over-investment in technology.
Businesses that describe themselves as "sales-led" tend towards a focus on speed and resource efficiency over quality. They will pride themselves on having a 'lean-and-mean' technology team, who work fast, cut-corners if needed, and get things in front of the customer quickly. Speed and customer-delivery are absolutely the right things, but taken too far leads to poor quality products, and burnt-out exhausted (or worse-still mistreated) engineering teams. Tiny teams, cutting any-and-every corner to get stuff out for a never-satisfied sales team. This is the extreme of 'too little technology'.
Businesses that describe themselves as "technology-led" tend towards a focus on quality and process efficiency over customer delivery. They pride themselves on building a 'strong platform' that has all the latest ideas and tech in it. Quality and good discipline is vital, but taken too far leads to an introverted focus on building something amazing, rather than delivering value to customers. Sprawling engineering empires, building things of great technical elegance for other sprawling engineering empires... This is the extreme of 'too much technology'.
One way to think about the 'right' amount of technology
So what is 'just enough' technology? A fun way to think about it that I came up with, is being like cars*. Meet, then, the four stereotypes of technical teams:
The Old Banger: The old-banger technology team isn't going anywhere fast. Sure it's cheap to run, 'mature' and is still on-the-road despite not having modernised since the 1970s, but even with their foot flat-to-the-floor, they are easily overtaken by, well, everyone.
The Boy Racer: This technology team has it all - alloy-inspectability-hubcaps, the latest machine learning seat warmers, and a huge kubernetes cluster in the boot. Rumour is, they even have a quantum computing environment in a lock-up near Epsom. While it may look amazing as it cruises by, it costs a fortune to even start the engine, and those state-of-the-art Spinnaker tyres wear out constantly, and those custom-rolled Istio intakes keep blocking at the worst moments... Far from overtaking everyone else, most people pass them pulled-over on the side of the road explaining to the customer's cybersecurity police why there's no firewall over the air intake.
The Family Car: This is what most companies opt for. Boring, reliable, easy-to-maintain, and spacious too. This team gets it done, no drama. They keep-up with the competition. So what's the problem? The problem is that they can only keep-up by keeping their foot somewhere close to the floor :- the flip side of having 'just enough' tech for the day-to-day is that they have little or nothing in reserve... When push-comes-to-shove (and my dear mum used to say), 'just enough' is 'just too little'.
The Motorway Car: This is what I think technology product companies should actually aspire too. It's like the family car, but it has just a bit more 'poke' when you need it. If you need to, you have a bit in reserve for those last minute dashes - to pull ahead of a competitor, to get something done for a big customer, to response (heaven fore-fend) to an incident. You can afford to build a solid platform (no bells or whistles, but a good platform), you can afford good hygiene on your processes, and you can afford to keep tech debt under-control so you can burn some when you need it.
So whether you are sales-led, technology-led, or somewhere in the middle, the question isn't "do you have just enough technology for business-as-usual?", the question should be "do you have just enough technology for when business-as-usual goes out the window?"
That's just my perspective, of course, I'd love to hear yours!
*It may be clear from this article that I don't actually know much about cars